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■wEEKlTTuBLlC^TIor/ 01= TKE BE^ CJR.R.E'^ t^^TANjjyVTCD Litef^VktUR^E 




Vol. 7. No. 395. June 13, 1884. Annual Subscription, $30.00. . 



English Men of Letters, Edited by John Morley. 



IFE 



OF 



MILTON 



BY 



MARK PATTISON 



Eatared at the Post CSce, N. Y., as Becond-elass matter. ^^ 

Coprrigbt, I8ti3« bjr John W. Lovbu. Co. ^g 



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LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 



1. Hyperion 20 

2. Outre-Mer 20 

3. The Happy Boy 10 

4. Arne 10 

5. Frankenstein 10 

6. TheLast of the Mohicans. 20 

7. Cly tie 20 

8. The Moonstone, Part 1 . 10 

9. The Moonstone, Part II, 10 

10. Oliver Twist 20 

11. The Coming Race 10 

12. Leila 10 

13. The Three Spaniards.. .20 

14. The Tricks of the Greeks.20 

15. L'Abbe Constantin 20 

16. Freckles 20 

17. The Dark Colleen 20 

18. They were Married .... 10 

19. Seekers After God 20 

20. The Spanish Nun 10 

21. Green Mountain Boys.. 20 

22. Fleurette 20 

23 . Second Thoughts 20 

24. The New Magdalen ....20 

25. Divorce 20 

26. Life of Washington 20 

27. Social Etiquette 15 

28. Single Heart, Double 

5 Face 10 

29. Irene ; or. The Lonely 

Manor 20 

30. Vice Versa 20 

3 1 . Ernest Maltravers 20 

32. The Haunted House... 10 

33. John Halifax 20 

34. 800 Leagues on the 
Amazon 10 

35. The Cryptogram 10 

36. Life of Marion 20 

37. Paul and Virginia 10 

38. A Tale of Two Cities .... 20 

39. The Hermits 20 

40. An Adventure in Thule, 
etc ID 

41. A Marriage in High Life2o 

42. Robin 20 

43. Two on a Tower 20 

44. Rasselas 10 

45. Alice ; a sequel to Er- 

nest Maltravers 20 

46. Duke of Kandos 20 

47. Baron Munchausen 10 

48. A Princess of Thule 20 

49. The Secret Despatch 20 

50. Early Days of Christian- 
ity, 2 Parts, each 20 

51. Vicar of Wakefield 10 

52. Progress and Poverty ... 20 

53. The Spy 20 

54. East Lynne 20 

55. A Strange Story 20 

56. Adam Bede, Part 1 15 

Adam Bede, Part II 15 

57. The Golden Shaft 20 

58. Portia 20 

59. Last Days of i'ompeii. . .20 

60. The Two Duchesses 20 

61. TomBrown'sSchoolDays.20 

62. Wooing O't, 2 i'cs. each. 15 

63. The Vendetta 20 

64. Hypatia, Part 1 15 

% Hypatia, Part II - , .... 15 



84. 

85. 
86. 
87. 
88. 
89. 
90. 
91. 

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"3- 
114. 

"5- 

J 16. 
117, 
118. 
ng. 
120. 
121. 
122. 
123. 
124. 
125. 

J26. 



Selma .••••iS 

Margaret and her Brides- 
maids 20 

Horse Shoe Robinson, 
2 Parts, each. .... ....15 

Gulliver's Travels 20 

Amos Barton 10 

The Berber 20 

Silas Marner 10 

Queen of the County . . .20 

Life of Cromwell 15 

Jane Eyre 20 

Child'sHist'ry of Engl'd.20 

Molly Bavra 20 

Pillone '. . . . . ... .... IS 

Phyllis 20 

Romola, Part 1 15 

Romola, Part II 15 

Science in ShortChapters.20 

Zanom 20 

A Daughter of Heth 20 

Right and Wrong Uses of 

the Bible 20 

Night and Morning, Pt. 1. 15 
NightandMorningjPt.II 15 

Shandon Bells 20 

Monica 10 

Heart and Science 20 

The Golden Calf 20 

The Dean's Daughter. . .20 

Mrs. Geoffrey 20 

Pickvrick Papers, Part 1 . 20 
Pickwick Papers,Part II. 20 

Airy, Fairy Lilian 20 

Macleod of Dare 20 

Tempest Tossed, Part I . ao 
Tempest Tossed, P't Il.ao 
Letters from High Lat- 
itudes 20 

Gideon Fley ce 20 

India and Ceylon 20 

The Gypsy Queen 20 

The Admiral's Ward 20 

Nimport, 2 Parts, each.. 15 

Harry Holbrooke 20 

Tritons, 2 Parts, each . . 15 
Let Nothing You Dismay. 10 
Lady Audley's Secret ... 20 
Woman's Place To-day. 20 
Dunallan, 2 parts, each. 15 
Housekeeping and Home 

making 15 

No New Thing 20 

The SpoopendykePapers. 20 

False Hopes... 15 

Labor and Capital 20 

Wanda, 2 parts, each ... 15 
More Words about Bible. 20 
Monsieur Lecocq, P't. 1. 20 
Monsieur Lecocq, Pt. 1 1. 20 
An Outline of Irish Hist. 10 

The Lerouge Case 20 

Paul Clifford 20 

A New Lease of Life ... 20 

Bourbon Lilies 20 

Other People's Money.. 20 

Lady of Lyons lo 

Ameline de Bourg 15 

A Sea Queen 20 

The Ladies Lindores. ..20 

Haunted Hearts 10 

Loys, Lord Beresford...20 



t34. 
^35. 
136. 
137- 
138. 
139- 
140. 
141. 
142. 

143. 
144. 

145- 

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IBs. 



Under Two Flags, Pt I. 20 
Under Two Flags, Pt II.20 

Money 10 

In Peril of His Life 20 

India; What can it teach 

us? 20 

Jets and Flashes 20 

Moonshine and Margue- 
rites 10 

Mr. Scarborough's 
Family, 2 Parts, each . . 15 

Arden 15 

Tower of Percemont. . . .20 

Yolande 20 

Cruel London 20 

The Gilded Clique 20 

Pike County Folks 20 

Cricket on the Hearth. .10 

Henry Esmond 20 

Strange Adventures of a 

Phaeton 20 

Denis Duval 10 

01dCuriosityShop,P't 1. 15 
OldCuriosityShop, P'rt II. 1 5 

Ivanhoe, Part 1 15 

Ivanhoe, Part II 15 

White Wings 20 

The Sketch Book 20 

Catherine 10 

Janet's Repentance 10 

Barnaby Rudge, Part I.. 15 
Barnaby Rudge, Part 1 1. 15 

Felix Holt... 20 

Richelieu 10 

Sunrise, Part 1 15 

Sunrise, Part II 15 

Tour of the Worid in 80 

Days 20 

Mystery of Orcival. .... .20 

Lovel, the Widower.. .. 10 

Romantic Adventures of 

a Milkmaid 10 

DavidCopperfield,Part 1. 20 
DavidCopperfieldjP'rt 1 1. 20 

Charlotte Temple 10 

Rienzi, 2 Parts, each ... 15 
Promise of Marriage .... 10 

Faith and Unfaith 20 

The Happy Man 10 

Barry Lyndon 20 

Eyre's Acquittal 10 

20,000 Leagues Under the | 

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Anti-Slavery Days 20 

Beauty's Daughters 20 

Beyond the Sunrise 20 

Hard Times 20 

Tom Cringle's Log 20 

Vanity Fair 30 

LTnderground Russia 20 

Middlemarch, 2 Pts. each.20 

Sir Tom 20 

Pelham 20 

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Madcap Violet 20 

The Little Pilgrim 10 

Kilmeny 20 

Whist, or Bumblepuppy ?. 10 
That Beautiful Wretch.. 20 

Her Mother's Sin 20 

Green Pastures, etc 20 

Mysterious Island, Pt 1. 15 




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MILTON 



BY 

MARK 'PATTISON, B. D. 

JLECTOR OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD, 



u 



NEW YORK: 

JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY, 
14 AND 16 Vesey Street. 



^?i- 



MILTON. 



FIRST PERIOD. 1608— 1639. 
CHAPTER I. 

FAMILY— SCHOOL— COLLEGE. 

In the seventeenth century it was not the custom to publish two 
volumes upon every man or woman whose name had appeared on 
a title-page. Nor, where lives of authors were written, were they 
written with the redundancy of particulars which is now allowecl. 
Especially are the lives of the poets and dramatists obscure and 
meagrely recorded. Of Milton, however, we know more personal 
details than of any man of letters of that age. Edward Phillips, 
the poet's nephew, who was brought up by his uncle, and lived in 
habits of intercourse with him to the last, wrote a life, brief, inexact, 
superficial, but valuable from the nearness of the writer to the sub- 
ject of his memoir. A contemporary of Milton, John Aubrey (b. 
1625), "a very honest man, and accurate in his accounts of matters 
of fact,' as Toland says of him, made it his business to learn all 
he could about Milton's habits. Aubrey was himself acquainted 
with Milton, and diligently catechised the poet's widow, his brother, 
and his nephew, scrupulously writing down each detail as it came 
to hiiu, in the minutes of lives which he supplied to Antony Wood, 
to be worked up in his Athence and Fasti. Aubrey was only an an- 
tiquarian collector, and was mainly dependent on what could be 
learned from the family. None of Milton's family, and least of all 
Edward Phillips, were of a capacity to apprehend moral or mental 
qualities, and they could only tell Aubrey of his goings out and his 
comings in, of the clothes he wore, the dates of events, the names 
of his acquaintance. In compensation for the want of ol^servation 
on the part of his own kith and kin, Milton himself, with a superb 
and ingenuous egotism, has revealed the secret of his thoughts 
and feelings in numerous autobiographical passages of his prose 
writings. From what he directly communicates, and from what he 
unconsciously betrays, we obtain an internal life of the mind, more 



g MILTOI\r. 

ample than that external life of the bodily machine, which we owe 
to Aubrey and Phillips. 

In our own generation all that printed books or written docu- 
ments have preserved about Milton has been laboriously brought 
together by Professor David Masson, in whose Life of Milton we 
have the most exhaustive biography that ever was compiled of any 
Englishman. It is a noble and final monument erected to the poet's 
memory, two centuries after his death. My excuse for attempting 
to write of Milton after Mr. Masson is that his Hfe is in six volumes 
octavo, with a total of some four or five thousand pages. The 
present outline is written for a different class of readers, those, 
namely, who cannot afford to know more of Milton than can be 
told in some two hundred and fifty pages. 

A family of Miltons, deriving the name in all probability from 
the parish of Great Milton near Thame, is found in various branches 
spread over Oxfordshire and the adjoining counties in the reign ot 
Elizabeth. The poet's grandfather was a substantial yeoman, liv- 
ing at Stanton St. John, about five miles from Oxford, within the 
forest of Shotover, of which he was also an under-ranger. The 
ranger's son John was at School in Oxford, possibly as a chorister, 
conformed to the Established Church, and was in consequence cast 
off by his father, who adhered to the old faith. The disinherited 
son went to London, and by the assistance of a friend was set 
up in business as a scrivener. A scrivener discharged some of the 
functions which, at the present day, are undertaken for us in a solic- 
itor's office. John Milton the father, being a man of probity and 
force of character, was soon on the way to acquire " a plentiful for- 
tune." But he continued to live over his shop, which was in Bread 
Street, Cheapside, and which bore the sign of the Spread Eagle, 
the family crest. 

It was at the Spread Eagle that his eldest son, John Milton, 
was born, 9th December, 1608, being thus exactly cotemporary 
with Lord Clarendon, who also died in the same year as the poet. 
Milton must be added to the long roll of our poets who have been 
natives of the city which now never sees sunlight or blue sk}-, along 
with Chaucer, Spenser, Herrick, Cowley, Shirley, Ben Johnson, 
Pope, Gray, Keats. Besides attending as a day-scholar at St. 
Paul's School, which was close at hand, his father engaged for 
him a private tutor at home. The household of the Spread Eagle 
not only enjoyed civic prosperity, but some share of that liberal 
cultivation which, if not imbibed in the home, neither school nor 
college ever confers. The scrivener was not only an amateur in 
music, but a composer, whose tunes, songs, and airs found their 
way into the best collections of music. Both schoolmaster and 
tutor were men of mark. The high master of St. Paul's at that 
time was Alexander Gill, and M.A. of Corpus Christi College, Ox- 
ford, who was " esteemed to have such an excellent way of training 
up youth, that none in his time went beyond it." The private tutor 
was Thomas Young, who was, or had been, curate to Mr. Gataker, 
of Rotherhithe, itself a certificate of merit, even if we had not the 



MILTON: g 

pupil's emphatic testimony of gratitude. Milton's fourth elegy is 
addressed to Young, when, in 1627, he was settled at Hamburg, 
crediting him with having first infused into his pupil a taste for 
classic literature and poetry. Biographers have derived Milton's 
Presbyterianism. in 1641 from the'lessons twenty years before of 
this Thomas Young, a Scotchman, and one of the authors of the 
S?necty7nnuus. This, however, is a misreading of Milton's mind — 
a mind which was an organic whole—" whose seed was in itself," 
self-determined ; not one whose opinions can be accounted for by 
contagion or casual impact. 

Of Milton's boyish exercises two have been preserved. They 
are English paraphrases of two of the Davidic Psalms, and were 
done at the age of fifteen. That they were thought by himself 
worth printing in the same volume with Coimis^ is the most note- 
worthy thing about them. No words are so commonplace but that 
they can be made to yield inference by a biographer. And even in 
these school exercises we think we can discern that the future poet 
was already a diligent reader of Sylvester's Du Bartas {1605), the 
patriarch of Protestant poetry, and of Fairfax's Tasso (1600). 
There are other indications that, from very early years, poetry had 
assumed a place in Milton's mind, not merely as a juvenile pastime, 
but as an occupation of serious import. 

Young Gill, son of the high master, a school-fellow of Milton^ 
went up to Trinity, Oxford, where he got into trouble by being in- 
formed against by Chillingwortli, who reported incautious Presby- 
terian speeches of Gill to his godfather. Laud. With Gilb Milton 
corresponded ; they exchanged their verses, Greek, Latin, and 
English with a confession on'^Milton's part that he prefers English 
and Latin composition to Greek : that to write Greek verses in 
this age was to sing to the deaf. Gill, Milton finds " a severe 
critic of poetry, however disposed to be lenient to his friend's at- 
tempts." 

If Milton's genius did not announce itself in his paraphrases 
of Psalms, it did in his impetuosity in learning, " which I seized 
with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarce 
ever went to bed before midnight." Such is his own account 
And it is worth notice that we have here an incidental test of th. 
trustworthiness of Aubrey's reminiscences. Aubrey's words are, 
" When he was very young he studied very hard, and sate up very 
late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night ; and his father 
ordered the maid to sit up for him." 

He was ready for college at sixteen, not earlier than the usual 
age at that period. As his schoolmasters, both the Gills, were 
Oxford men (Young was of St. Andrew's), it might have been ex- 
pected that the young scholar would have been placed at Oxford. 
However, it was determined that he should go to Cambridge, 
where he was admitted a pensioner of Christ's, 12th February, 
1625, and commenced residence in the Easter term ensuing. Per. 
haps his father feared the growing High Church, or, as it was then 
called, Arminianism, of his own university. It so happened, how 



lo MILTON. 

ever, that the tutor to whom the young Milton was consigned was 
specially noted for Arminian proclivities. This was William Chap- 
pell, then Fellow of Christ's, who so recommended himself to Laud 
by his part}^ zeal that he was advanced to be Provost of Dublin and 
Bishop of Cork, 

Milton was one of those pupils who are more likely to react 
against a tutor than to take a ply from him. A preaching divine 
— Chappell composed a treatise on the art of preaching — a narrow 
ecclesiastic of the type loved by Laud, was exactly the man who 
would drive Milton into opposition. But the tutor of the seven- 
teenth centur}' was not able, like the easy-going tutor of the eight- 
eenth, to leave the young rebel to pursue the reading of his choice 
in his own chamber. Chappell endeavoured to drive his pupil 
along the scholastic highway of exercises. Milton, returning to 
Cambridge after his summer vocation, eager for the acquisition of 
wisdom, complains that he •' was dragged from his studies, and 
compelled to employ himself in composing some frivolous declama- 
tion ! " Indocile, as he confesses himself (indocilisque aetas prava 
magistra fuit), he kicked against either the discipline or the exer- 
cises exacted by college rules. He was punished. Aubrey had 
heard that he was flogged, a thing not impossible in itself, as the 
Admonition Book of Emanuel gives an instance of corporal chas- 
tisement as late as 1667. Aubrey's statement, however, is a dubi- 
tative interlineation in his MS., and Milton's age, seventeen, as 
well as the silence of his later detractors, who raked up everything 
which could be told to his disadvantage, concur to make us hesitate 
to accept a fact on so slender evidence. Anyhow, Milton was sent 
away from college for a time, in the year 1627, in consequence of 
something unpleasant which had occurred. That it was something 
of which he was not ashamed is clear, from his alluding to it h'm- 
self in the lines written at the time, — 

" Nee duras usque libet minas perferre magistri 
Caeteraque iiigenio non subeunda meo." 

And that the tutor was not considered to have been wholly free 
from blame is evident from the fact that the master transferred 
Milton from Chappell to another tutor, a very unusual proceeding. 
Whatever the nature of the punishment, it was not what is known 
as rustication ; for Milton did not lose a term, taking his two de- 
grees of B.A. and M.A. in regular course, at the earliest date from 
his matriculation permitted by the statutes. The one outbreak of 
juvenile petulance and indiscipline over, Milton's force of character 
and unusual attainments acquired him the esteem of his seniors. 
The nickname of " the lady of Christ's," given him in derison by 
his fellow-students, is an attestation of virtuous conduct. Ten 
years later, in 1642, Milton takes an opportunity to "acknowledge 
publicly, with all grateful mind, that more than ordinary respect 
which I found, above many of my equals, at the hands of those 
courteous and learned men, the Fellows of that college wherein I 
spent some years ; who, at my parting, after I had taken two de- 



MILTON. II 

grees, as the manner is, signified many ways how much better it 
would content them that I would stay; as by many letters full of 
kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, 
I was assured of their singular good affection towards me." 

The words '"' how much better it would content them that I 
would stay " have been thought to hint at the offer of a fellowship 
at Christ's. It is highly improbable that such an offer was ever 
made. There had been two vacancies in the roll of fellows since 
Milton had become eligible by taking his B.A. degree, and he had 
been passed over in favour of juniors, who were pushed by Court 
patrons or college favouritism. And in universities generally, it is 
not literature or general acquirements which recommend a candi- 
date for endowed posts, but technical skill in the prescribed exer- 
cises, and a pedagogic intention. 

Further than this, had a fellowship in his college been attain- 
able, it would not have had much attraction for Milton. A 
fellowship implied two things, residence in college, with teach- 
ing, and orders in the church. With neither of these two con- 
ditions was Milton prepared to comply. In 1632, when he pro- 
ceeded to his M.A. degree, Milton was twenty-four, he had been 
seven years in college, and had therefore sufficient experience 
what college life was like. He who was so impatient of the " turba 
legentum prava" in the Bodleian hbrar}^, could not have patiently 
consorted with the vulgar-minded and illiterate ecclesiastics who 
peopled the colleges of that day. Even Mede, though the author 
of Clavis Apocalyptica was steeped in the soulless clericalism of 
his age, could not support his brother-fellows without frequent re- 
tirements to Balsham, " being not willing to be joined with such 
company." To be dependent upon Bainbrigge's (the Master of 
Christ's) good pleasure for a supply of pupils ; to have to live in 
daily intercourse with the Powers and the Chappells, such as we 
know them from Mede's letters, was an existence to which only 
the want of daily bread could have driven Milton. Happily his 
father's circumstances were not such as to make a fellowship pe- 
cuniarily an object to the son. If he longed for "the studious 
cloister's pale," he had been now for seven years near enough to 
college life to have dispelled the dream that it was a life of lettered 
leisure and philosophic retirement. It was just about Milton's 
time that the college tutor finally supplanted the university pro- 
fessor, a system which implied the substitution of exercises per- 
formed by the pupil for instruction given by the teacher. What- 
ever advantages this system brought with it, it brought inevitably 
the degradation of the teacher, who was thus dispensed from 
knowledge, having only to attend to form. The time of the col- 
lege tutor was engrossed by the details of scholastic superintend- 
ence, and the frivolous worry of academical business. Admissions, 
matriculations, disputations, declamations, the formalities of de- 
grees, public reception of royal and noble visitors, filled every 
hour of his day, and left no time, even if he had had the taste, for 
private study. To teaching, as we shall see, Milton was far from 



12 MILTON. 

averse. But then it must be teaching as he understood it, a teach' 
ing which should expand the intellect and raise the character, not 
dexterity in playing with the verbal formulae of the disputations of 
the schools. 

Such an occupation could have no attractions for one who was 
even now meditating // Penseroso (composed 1633). At twenty he 
had already confided to his school-fellow, the young Gill, the secret 
of his discontent with the Cambridge tone. " Here among us." he 
writes from college, " are barely one or two who do not flutter 
off, all unfledged, into theology, having gotten of philology or of 
philosophy scarce so much as a smattering. And for theology they 
are content with just what is enough to enable them to patch up a 
paltry sermon." He retained the same feeling towards his Alma 
Mater in 1641, when he wrote (Reason of Church Government), 
" Cambridge, which as in the time of her better health, and mine 
own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, so now much 
less , . ." 

On a review of all these indications of feeling, I should conclude 
that Milton never had serious thoughts of a college fellowship, and 
that his antipathy arose from a sense of his own incompatibility of 
temper w^ith academic hfe, and was not, like Phineas Fletcher's, 
the result of disappointed hopes, and a sense of injury for having 
been refused a fellowship at King's. One consideration which 
remains to be mentioned would alone be decisive in favour of this 
view^ A fellowship required orders. Milton had been intended 
for the church, and had been sent to college with that view. By 
the time he left Cambridge, at twenty-four, it had become clear 
both to himself and his family that he could never submit his under- 
standing to the tramels of church formularies. His later mind, 
about 1 641, is expressed by himself in his own forcible style, — • 
" The church, to whose service by the intention of my parents and 
friends I was destined of a child, and in mine own resolutions, till 
coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had 
invadecl in the church, that he who would take orders must sub- 
scribe slave, and take an oath withal. ... I thought it better to 
prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, 
bought and begun with servitude and forswearing." When he 
took leave of the university, in 1632, he had perhaps not develojjed 
this distinct antipathy to the establishment. For in a letter, pre- 
served in Trinity College, and written in the winter of 1631-32, he 
does not put forward any conscientious objections to the clerical 
profession, but only apologises to the friend to whom the letter is 
addressed for delay in making choice of some profession. The 
delay itself sprung from an unconscious distaste, f In a mind of the 
consistent texture of Milton's, motives are secretly influential be- 
fore they emerge in consciousness. We shall not be wrong in 
asserting that when he left Cambridge in 1632, it was already im- 
possible, in the nature of things, that he should have taken orders 
in the Church of England, or a fellowship of which orders were a 
condition. 



MILTON, 



13 



CHAPTER TI. 

RESIDENCE AT HORTON — L'ALLEGRO— IL PENSEROSO— ARCADES 
— COMUS— LYCIDAS. 

Milton had been sent to college to qualify for a profession. 
The church, the first intended, he had gradually discovered to be 
incompatible. Of the law, either his father's branch, or some 
other, he seems to have entertained a thought, but to have speedily 
dismissed it. So at the age of twenty-four he returns to his father's 
house, bringing nothing with him but his education and a silent 
purpose. The elder Milton had now retired from business, with 
sufficient means, but not with wealth. Though John v/as the eldest 
son, there were two other children, a brother, Christopher, and a 
sister, Anne. To have no profession, even a nominal one, to be 
above trade and below the status of squire or yeoman, and to come 
home with the avowed object of leading an idle life, was conduct 
which required justification. Milton felt it to be so. In a letter 
addressed, in 1632, to some senior friend at Canibridge, name un- 
known, he thanks him for being " a good watchman to admonish 
that the hours of the night pass on, for so I call my life, as yet ob- 
scure and unserviceable to mankind, and that the day with me is at 
hand, wherein Christ commands all to labour." Milton has no mis- 
givings. He knows that what he is doing with himself is the best 
he can do. His aim is far above bread-winning, and therefore his 
probation must be long. He destines for hTmself no indolent 
tarrying in the garden of Armida. His is a " mind made and set 
wholly on the accomplishment of greatest things." He knows that 
the looker-on will hardly accept his apology for "being late," that 
it is in order to being " more fit." Yet it^is the only apology he 
can offer. And he is dissatisfied with his own progress. " I am 
something suspicious of myself, and do take notice of a certain 
belatedness in me." 

Of this frame of mind the record is the second sonnet, lines 
which are an inseparable part of Milton's biography — 

" How soon hath Time, the subtl® thief of youth, 

Stol'n on his wing my three and-twentieth yearl 
My hasting days fly on with full career, 
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. 



I^ MILTON, 

Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth 

That I to manhood am arrived so near, 

And inward ripeness doth much less appear, 
That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th. 
Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow, 

It shall be still in strictest measure even 

To that same lot, however mean or high, 
Towards which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. 

All is, if I have grace to use it so, 

As ever in my great Taskm^eter's eye." 

With aspirations thus vast, though unformed, with " amplitude of 
mind to greatest deeds," Milton retired to his father's house in the 
country. Five more years of self-education, added to the seven 
years of academical residence, v/ere not too much for the meditation 
of projects such as Milton was already conceiving. Years many 
more than twelve, filled with great events and distracting interests, 
were to pass over before the body and shape of Paradise Lost was 
given to these imaginings. 

The country retirement in which the elder Milton had fixed 
himself was the little village of Horton, situated in that southern- 
most angle of the county "of Buckingham which insinuates itself 
between Berks and Middlesex. Though only about seventeen 
miles from London, it v/as the London of Charles L, with its popu- 
lation of some 300,000 only ; before coaches and macadamised 
roads ; while the Colne, which flows through the village, was still 
a river, and not the kennel of a paper-mill. There was no lack of 
water and wood, meadow and pasture, closes and open field, with 
the regal towers of Windsor, " bosom'd high in tufted trees," to 
crown the landscape. Unbroken leisure, solitude, tranquillity of 
mind, surrounded by the thickets and woods which Pliny thought 
indispensable to poetical meditation (Epist. 9. 10), no poet's career 
was ever commenced under more favourable auspices. The youth 
of Milton stands in strong contrast with the misery, turmoil, chance 
medley, struggle with poverty, or abandonment to dissipation, which 
blighted the early years of so many of our men of letters. Milton's 
life is a drama in three acts. The first discovers him in the calm 
and peaceful retirement of Horton, of which VAllegi'o^ II Peti- 
seroso, and Lycidas are the expression. In the second act he is 
breathing the foul and heated atmosphere of party passion and re- 
ligious hate, generating the lurid fires which glare in the battailous 
canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great poems, Para- 
dise Lost, Pa?'adise Regained, and Samso7i Agoftistes, are the ut- 
terance of his final period of solitary and Promethean grandeur, 
when, blind, destitute, friendless, he testified of righteousness, 
temperance, and judgment to come, alone before a fallen world. 

In this delicious retirement of Horton, in alternate communing 
with nature and with books, for five years of persevering study he 
laid in a stock, not of learning, but of what is far above learning, 
of wide and accurate knowledge. Of the man whose profession is 
learning, it is characteristic that knowledge is its own end, and re- 



MILTO^r. 15 

search its own reward. To Milton all knowledge, all life, virtue 
itself, was already only a means to a further end. He will know 
only " that which is of use to know," and by useful, he meant that 
which conduced to form him for his vocation of poet. 

From a very early period Milton had taken poetry to be his vo- 
cation, in the most solemn and earnest mood. The idea of this 
devotion was the shaping idea of his life. It was, indeed, a bent 
of nature, with roots drawing from deeper strata of character than 
any act of reasoned will, which kept him out of the professions, 
and now fixed him, a seeming idler, but really hard at work, in his 
father's house at Horton. The intimation which he had given of 
his purpose in the sonnet above quoted had become, in 1641, "an 
inward prompting which grows daily upon me, that by labour and 
intent study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with 
the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something 
so written to after times, as they should not wiUingly let it die." 

What the ultimate form of his poetic utterance shall be, he is 
in no hurry to decide. He will be " long choosing," and quite con- 
tent to be " beginning late." All his care at present is to qualify 
himself for the lofty function to which he aspires. No lav/yer, 
physician, statesman, ever laboured to fit himself for his profession 
harder than Milton strove to qualify himself for his vocation of 
poet. Verse-making is, to the wits, a game of ingenuity ; to Milton, 
it is a prophetic ofiice, towards which the will of Heaven leads him. 
The creation he contemplates will not flow from him as the stanzas 
of the Geriisalet7ivie6\di from Tasso at tv/enty-one. Before he can 
make a poem, Milton will make himself. " I was confirmed in this 
opinion, that he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write 
well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem 
. c . . not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous 
cities, unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all 
that which is praiseworthy." 

Of the spontaneity, the abandon, which are supposed to be 
characteristic of the poetical nature, there is nothing here ; all is 
moral purpose, precision, self-dedication. So he acquires all knowl- 
edge, not for knowledge' sake, from the instinct of learning, the neces- 
sity for completeness, but because he is to be a poet. Nor will he 
only have knowledge, he will have wisdom ; moral development shall 
go hand in hand with intellectual. A poet's soul should " contain 
of good, wise, just, the perfect shape." He will cherish continu- 
ally a pure mind in a pure body. " I argued to myself that, if 
unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be 
such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both 
the image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so 
thought, be much m.ore deflouring and dishonourable." There is 
yet a third constituent of the poetical nature ; to knowledge and to 
virtue must be added religion. For it is from God that the poet's 
thoughts come. " This is not to be obtained but by devout prayer 
to that Eternal Spirit that can enrich with all utterance and 
knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of 



1 6 MILTON. 

his altar, to touch and purify the life of whom he pleases. To 
this must be added industrious and select reading, steady ob- 
servation, and insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs ; 
till which in some measure be compast, I refuse not to sustain this 
expectation." Before the piety of this vow, Dr. Johnson's moros- 
ity yields for a moment, and he is forced to exclaim, " From a 
promise like this, at once fervid, pious, and rational, might be ex- 
pected the Paradise Lost." 

Of these years of self-cultivation, of conscious moral architec- 
ture, such as Plato enacted in his ideal State, but none but Milton 
ever had the courage to practise, the biographer would gladly give 
a minute account. But the means of doing so are wanting. The 
poet kept no diary of his reading, such as some great students, e. g. 
Isaac Casaubon, have left. Nor could such a record, had it been 
attempted, have shown us the secret process by which the scholar's 
dead learning was transmuted in Milton's mind into living imagery. 
"Many studious and contemplative years, altogether spent in the 
search of religious and civil knowledge " is his own description of 
the period. " You make many inquiries as to what I am about ; " 
he writes to Diodati— " what am I thinking of ? Why, with God's 
help, of immortality ! Forgive the word, I only whisper it in your 
ear ! Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight." This was in 
1 637, at the end of five years of the Horton probation. The poems, 
which, rightly read, are strewn with autobiographical hints, are not 
silent as to the intention of this period. In Paradise Recrained 
(i. 196), Milton reveals himself. And in Comus^ written at Horton, 
the lines 375 and following are charged with the same sentiment, — 

" And wisdom's self 
Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude. 
Where, with her best nurse, contemplation, 
She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings, 
That in the various bustle of resort 
Were all-to ruffled and sometimes impair'd." 

That at Horton Milton " read all the Greek and Latin writers " 
is one of Johnson's careless versions of Milton's own words, "en- 
joyed a complete holiday in turning over Latin and Greek authors." 
Milton read, not as a professional theologian, but as a poet and 
scholar, and always in the light of his secret purpose. It was not 
in his way to sit down to read over all the Greek and Latin writers, 
as Casaubon or Salmasius might do. Milton read with selection, 
and " meditated," says Aubrey, what he read. His practice con- 
formed to the principle he has himself laid down in the often- 
quoted lines {Paradise Regained, iv. 322)— 

" Who reads 
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not 
A spirit and judgment equal or superior, 
Uncertain and unsettled still remains, 
Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself." 



MILTON. 



17 



Some of Milton's Greek books have been traced ; his Aratus^ 
Lycophron^ Euripides (the Stephanus of 1602), and his Pindar 
(the Benedictus of 1620), are still extant, with marginal memoranda, 
which seem to evince careful and discerning reading. One critic 
even thought it worth while to accuse Joshua Barnes of silently 
appropriating conjectural emendations from Milton's Euripides. 
But Milton's own poems are the best evidence of his familiarity 
with all that is most choice in the remains of classic poetry. 
Though the commentators are accused of often seeing an imitation 
where there is none, no commentary can point out the ever-present 
infusion of classical flavour, which bespeaks intimate converse far 
more than direct adaptation. Milton's classical allusions, says 
Hartley Coleridge, are amalgamated and consubstantiated with his 
native thought. 

A commonplace book of Milton's, after having lurked unsus- 
pected for 200 years in the archives of Netherby, has been dis- 
intered in our own day (1874). It appears to belong partly to the 
end of the Horton period. It is not by any means an account of 
all that he is reading, but only an arrangement under certain heads 
or places of memoranda for future use. These notes are extracted 
from about eighty different authors, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, 
and English. Of Greek authors no less than sixteen are quoted. 
The notes are mostly notes of historical facts, seldom of thoughts, 
never of mere verbal expression. There is no trace in it of any 
intention to store up either the imagery or the language of poetry. 
It may be that such notes were made and entered in another vol- 
ume ; for the book thus accidentally preserved to us seems to refer 
to other similar volumes of collections. But it is more likely that 
no such poetical memoranda were ever made, and that Milton 
trusted entirely to memory for the wealth of classical allusion with 
which his verses are surcharged. He did not extract from the 
poets and the great writers whom he was daily turning over, but 
only from the inferior authors and secondary historians, which he 
read only once. Most of the material collected in the common- 
place book is used in his prose pamphlets. But the facts are 
worked into the texture or his argument, rather than cited as ex- 
traneous witnesses. 

In reading history it was his aim to get at a conspectus of the 
general current of affairs rather than to study minutely a special 
period. He tells Diodati in September, 1637, that he has studied 
Greek history continuously from the beginning to the fall of Con- 
stantinople. When he tells the same friend that he has been long 
involved in the obscurity of the early middle ages of Itahan history 
down to the time of the Emperor Rudolf, we learn from the com- 
monplace book that he had only been reading the one volume of 
Sigonius's Historia Regni Italici. From the thirteenth century 
downwards he proposes to himself to study each Italian state in some 
separate history. Even before his journey to Italy he read Italian 
with as much ease as French. He tells us that it was by his father's 
advice that he had acquired these modern languages. But we can 

3 



l8 MILTON. 

see that they were essential parts of his own scheme of self-educa« 
tion, which included, in another direction, Hebrew, both Biblical 
and Rabbinical, and even Syriac. 

The intensity of his nature showed itself in his method of study. 
He read, not desultorily, a bit here and another there, but " when 
I take up with a thing, I never pause or break it off, nor am drawn 
away from it by any other interest, till I have arrived at the goal I 
proposed to myself." He made breaks occasionally in this routine 
of study by visits to London, to see friends, to buy books, to take 
lessons in mathematics, to go to the theatre, or to conceris. A 
love of music was inherited from his father. 

I have called this period, 1632-39, one of preparation, and not 
of production. But though the first volume of poems printed by 
Milton did not appear till 1645, the most considerable part of its 
contents was written during the period included in the present 
chapter. 

The fame of the author of 'Paradise Lost has over-shadowed 
that of the author oi V Allegro, II Pe?ise7'oso, and Lycidas. Yet 
had Paj'adise Lost never been written, these three poems, with 
Comiis, would have sufficed to place their author in a class apart, 
and above all those who had used the English language for poetical 
purposes before him. It is incumbent on Milton's biographer to 
relate the circumstances of the composition of Co?mis, as it is an 
incident in the life of the poet. 

Milton's musical tastes had brought him the acquaintance 
of Henry Lawes, at that time the most celebrated composer in 
England. When the Earl of Bridgewater would give an enter- 
tainment at Ludlow castle to celebrate his entry upon his office as 
President of Wales and the Marches, it was to Lawes that appli- 
cation was made to furnish the music. Lawes, as naturally, applied 
to his young poetical acquaintance Milton to write the words. The 
entertainment was to be of that sort which was fashionable at court, 
and was called a Mask. In that brilliant period of court life which 
was inaugurated by Elizabeth and put an end to by the Civil War, 
a Mask was a frequent and favourite amusement. It was an ex- 
hibition in which pageantry and music predominated, but in which 
dialogue was introduced as accompaniment Dr explanation. 

The dramatic Mask of the sixteenth century has been traced 
by the antiquaries as far back as the time of Edward III. But in 
its perfected shape it was a genuine offspring of the English re- 
naissance, a cross between the vernacular mummery, or mystery- 
play, and the Greek drama. No great court festival was considered 
complete without such a public show. Many of our great dramatic 
writers, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Shir- 
ley, Carew, were constrained by the fashion of the time to apply 
their invention to gratify this taste for decorative representation. 
No less an artist than Inigo Jones must occasionally stoop to con- 
struct the machinery. 

The taste for grotesque pageant in the open air must have grad- 
ually died out before the general advance of refinement. The 



MILTON. 



19 



Mask by a process of evolution would have become the Opera. 
But it often happens that when a taste or fashion is at the point of 
death, it undergoes a forced and temporary revival. So it was with 
the Mask. In 1633, the Puritan hatred to the theatre had blazed 
out in Prynne's Histriomastix, and, as a natural consequence, the 
lo3^al and cavalier portion of society threw themselves into dramatic 
amusements of every kind. It was an unreal revival of the Mask, 
stimulated by political passion, in the wane of genuine taste for the 
fantastic and semi-barbarous pageant, in which the former age had 
delighted. What the imagination of the spectators was no longer 
equal to, was to be supplied by costliness of dress and scenery. 
These last representations of the expiring Mask were the occa- 
sions of an extravagant outlay. The Inns of Court and Whitehall 
vied with each other in the splendour and solemnity with which 
they brought out, — the Lawyers, Shirley's Triwnph of Peace., — the 
Court, Carew's Ccehim BritannicuiJi. 

It was a strange caprice of fortune that made the future poet of 
the Puritan epic the last composer of a cavalier mask. The slight 
plot, or story, of Comus was probably suggested to Milton by his 
recollection of George Peele's Old Wi-oes'' Tale, which he may 
have seen on the stage. The personage of Comus was borrowed 
from a Latin extravaganza by a Dutch professor, whose Co7nus was 
reprinted at Oxford in 1634, the very year in which Milton wrote 
his Mask. The so-called tradition collected by Oldys, of the young 
Egertons, who acted in Co7niis, having lost themselves in Haywood 
Forest on their way to Ludlow, obviously grew out of Milton's 
poem. However casual the suggestion, or unpromising the occasion, 
Milton worked out of it a strain of poetry such as had never been 
heard in England before. If any any reader wishes to reahse the 
immense step upon what had gone before him, which was now made 
by a young man of twenty-seven, he should turn over some of the 
most celebrated of the masks of the Jacobean period. 

We have no information how Comns was received when rep- 
resented at Ludlow, but it found a public of readers. For Lawes, 
who had the MS. in his hands, was no importuned for copies that, 
in 1637, he caused an edition to be printed off. Not surreptitiously ; 
for though Lawes does not say, in the dedication to Lord Brackley, 
that he had the author's leave to print, we are sure that he had it, 
only from the motto. On the title page of this edition (1637) is a 
quotation from Virgil, — 

" Eheu ! quid volui misero mihi ! floribus austrum 
Perditus." 

The words are Virgil's, but the appropriation of them, and their 
application in this " second intention," is too exquisite to have been 
made by any but Milton. 

To the poems of the Horton period belong also the two pieces 
V Allegro and // Penseroso, and Lycidas. He was probably in the 
early stage of acquiring the language, when he superscribed the 



20 MILTON: 

two first poems with their Italian titles. For there is no such word 
as " Penseroso," the adjective formed from " Pensiero " being 
" pensieroso." Even had the word been written correctly, its 
signification is not that which Milton intended, viz. thoughtful, or 
contemplative, but anxious, full of cares, carking. The rapid puri- 
fication of Milton's taste will be best perceived by comparing L Al- 
legro 2indi II Pe7iseT'oso of uncertain date, but written after 1632, 
with the Ode on the A-ativity, written 1629. The Ode, notwith- 
standing its foretaste of Milton's grandeur, abounds in frigid con- 
ceits, from which the two later pieces are free. The Ode is frosty, 
as written in winter, within the four walls of a college chamber. 
The two idylls breathe the free air of spring and summer, and of 
the fields round Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic ; the 
choicest expression our language has yet found of the fresh charm 
of country life, not as that life is lived by the peasant, but as it is 
felt by a young and lettered student, issuing at early dawn, or at 
sunset, into the fields from his chamber and his books. All rural 
sights and sounds and smells are here blended in that ineffable 
combination which once or twice perhaps in our lives has saluted 
our young senses before their perceptions were blunted by alcohol, 
by lust, or ambition, or diluted by the social distractions of great 
cities. 

The fidelity to nature of the imagery of these poems has been 
impugned by the critics. 

" Then to come, in spite of sorrow, 
And at my window bid good-morrow." 

The skylark never approaches human habitations in this way, as 
the redbreast does. Mr. Masson repHes that the subject of the 
verb " to come " is, not the skylark, but L'Allegro, the joyous 
.'student. I cannot construe the lines as Mr. Masson does, even 
though the consequence vv^ere to convict Milton, a city-bred youth, 
of not knowing a skylark from a sparrow when he saw it. A close 
observer of things around us would not speak of the eglantine as 
twisted, of the cowslip as wan, of the violet as glowing, or of the 
reed as balmy. Lycidas' laureate hearse is to be strewn at once 
with primrose and woodbine, daffodil and jasmine. The pine is 
not " rooted deep as high " [P.R. 4416), but sends its roots along 
the surface. The elm, one of the thinnest-foliaged trees of the 
forest, is inappropriately named starproof (^Arc. 89). Lightning 
does not singe the top of trees (/* Z. i. 613), but either shivers 
them, or cuts a grove down tiie stem to the ground. These and 
other such like inaccuracies must be set down partly to conven- 
tional language used without meaning, the vice of Latin versification 
enforced as a task, but they are partly due to real defect of natural 
knowledge. 

Other objections of the critics on the same score, which may be 
met with, are easily dismissed. The objector, who can discover no 
reason why the oak should be styled " monumental," meets with his 



MILTON. 21 

match in the defender who suggests that it may be rightly so called 
because monuments in churches are made of oak. I should trem- 
ble to have to offer an explanation to critics of Milton so acute as 
these two. But of less ingenious readers I would ask, if any single 
word can be found equal to " monumental " in its power of sug- 
gesting to the imagination the historic oak of park or chase, up to 
the knees in fern, which has outlasted ten generations of men ; has 
been the mute witness of the scenes of love, treachery, or violence 
enacted in the baronial hall which it shadows and protects; and has 
been so associated with man that it is now rather a column and 
memorial obelisk than a tree of the forest ? 

These are the humours of criticism. But, apart from these, a 
naturalist is at once aware that Milton had neither the eye nor the 
ear of a naturahst. At no time, even before his loss of sight, was 
he an exact observer of natural objects. It may be that he knew a 
skylark from a redbreast, and did not confound the dog-rose with 
the honey-suckle. But I am sure that he had never acquired that 
interest in nature's things and ways which leads to close and loving 
watching of them. He had not that sense of outdoor nature, 
empirical and not scientific, which endows the A7igler of his co- 
temporary Walton with his enduring charm, and which is to be 
acquired only by living in the open country in childhood. Milton 
is not a man of the fields, but of books. His Hfe is in his study, 
and when he steps abroad into the air he carries his study thoughts 
with him. He does look at nature, but he sees her through books. 
Natural impressions are received from without, but always in those 
forms of beautiful speech in which the poets of all ages have 
clothed them. His epithets are not, like the epithets of the school 
of Dryden and Pope, culled from the Gradus ad Pamassum ; they 
are expressive of some reahty, but it is of a real emotion in the 
spectator's soul, not of any quality detected by keen insight in the 
objects themselves. This emotion Milton's art stamps with an 
epithet which shall convey the added charm of classical reminiscence. 
When, e. g., he speaks of " the wand'ring moon," the original signific- 
ance of the epithet comes home to the scholarly reader with the 
enhanced effect of its association with the •' errantum lunam " of 
Horace. Nor because it is adopted from Horace has the epithet 
here the second-hand effect of a copy. If Milton sees nature 
through books, he still sees it. 

"To behold the wand'ring moon, 
Riding near her highest noon, 
Like one that had been led astray, 
Through the heaven's wide pathless way, 
And oft, as if her head she bowe'd, 
Stooping through a fleecy cloud." 

No allegation that " wand'ring moon " is borrowed from Horace can 
hide from us that Milton, though he remembered Horace, had 
watched the phenomenon with a feeling so intense that he projected 



22 MILTON: 

his own soul's throb into the object before him, and named it with 
what Thomson calls " recollected love." 

Milton's attitude towards nature is not that of a scientific natur- 
alist, nor even that of a close observer. It is that of a poet who 
feels its total influence too powerfully to dissect it. If, as I have 
said, Milton reads books first and nature afterwards, it is not to test 
nature by his books, but to learn from both. He is learning, not 
books, but from books. All he reads, sees, hears, is to him but 
nutriment for the soul. He is making himself. Man is to him the 
highest object ; nature is subordinate to man, not only in its more 
vulgar uses, but as an excitant of fine emotion. He is not con- 
cerned to register the facts and phenomena of nature, but to con- 
vey the impressions they make on a sensitive soul. The external 
forms of things are to be presented to us as transformed through 
the heart and mind of the poet. The moon is endowed with life 
and will, "stooping," "riding," "wand'ring," "bowing her head," 
not as a" frigid personification, and because the ancient poets so 
personified her, but by communication to her of the intense agita- 
tion which the nocturnal spectacle rouses in the poet's own breast. 

I have sometimes read that these two idylls are " masterpieces 
of description." Other critics will ask if in the scenery of Z'y///<?- 
gro diud II Pensejoso Milton has described the country about Horton, 
in Bucks, or that about Forest Hill, in Oxfordshire ; and will object 
that the Chiltern Hills are not high enough for clouds to rest upon 
their top, much less upon their breast. But he has left out the 
pollard willows, says another censor, and the lines of pollard willow 
are the prominent feature in the valley of the Colne, even more so 
than the " hedgerow elms." Does the line " Walk the studious clois- 
ters pale," 7nean St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey ? When these 
things can continue to be asked, it is hardly superfluous to con- 
tinue to repeat that truth of fact and poetical truth are two different 
things. Milton's attitude towards nature is not that of a "descrip- 
tive poet," if indeed the phrase be not a self-contradiction. 

In Milton, nature is not put forward as the poet's theme. His 
theme is man, in the two contrasted moods of joyous emotion or 
grave reflection. The shifting scenery ministers to the varying 
mood. Thomson, in the Seasons (1726), sets himself to render 
natural phenomena as they truly are. He has left us a vivid pre- 
sentation in gorgeous language of the naturalistic calendar of the 
changing year. Milton, in these two idylls, has recorded a day of 
twenty-four hours. But he has not registered the phenomena ; he 
places us at the standpoint of the man before whom they deploy. 
And the man, joyous or melancholy, is not a bare spectator of 
them ; he is the student, compounded of sensibility and intelli- 
gence, of whom we are not told that he saw so and so, or that he 
felt so, but with whom we are made copartners of his thoughts and 
feeling. Description melts into emotion, and contemplation bodies 
itself in imager3\ All the charm of rural hfe is there, but it is not 
tendered to us in the form of a landscape ; the scenery is subordi- 
nated to the human figure in the centre. 



MILTON. 23 

These two short idylls are marked by a gladsome spontaneity 
which never came to Milton again. The delicate fancy and feeling 
which play about L Allegro and // Pejiseroso never reappear, and 
form a strong contrast to the austere imaginings of his later poetical 
period. These two poems have the freedom and frolic, the natural 
grace of movement, the improvisation, of the best EHzabethan ex- 
amples, while both thoughts and words are under a strict economy 
unknown to the diffuse exuberance of the Spenserians. 

In Lycidas (1637) we have reached the high-water mark of Eng- 
lisn poesy and of Milton's own production. A period of a century 
and a half was to elapse before poetry in England seemed, in Words- 
worth's Ode on Immortality (1807), to be rising again towards the 
level of inspiration which it had once attained in Lycidas. And in 
the development of the Miltonic genius this wonderful dirge marks 
the culminating point. As the twin idylls of 1632 show a great ad 
vance upon the Ode 07i the Nativity (1629), the growth of the poetic 
mind during the five years which follow 1632 is registered in 
Lycidas. Like the H Allegro and // Penseroso, Lycidas is laid out 
on the lines of the accepted pastoral fiction ; like them it offers ex- 
quisite touches of idealised rural Hfe. But Lycidas opens up a 
deeper vein of feeling, a patriot passion so vehement and danger- 
ous that, like that which stirred the Hebrew prophet, it is com- 
pelled to veil itself from power, or from sympathy, in utterance 
made purposely enigmatical. The passage which begins " Last 
came and last did go " raises in us a thrill of awe-struck expectation 
which I can only compare with that excited by the Cassandra of 
iEschylus's Agamemiion. For the reader to feel this, he must 
have present in memory the circumstances of England in 1637. He 
must place himself as far as possible in the situation of a cotem- 
porary. The study of Milton's poetry compels the study of his 
time ; and Professor Masson's six volumes are not too much to 
enable us to understand that there were real causes for the in- 
tense passion which glows underneath the poet's words — a passion 
which unexplained would be thought to be intrusive. 

The historical exposition must be gathered from the English 
history of the period, which may be read in Professor Masson's 
excellent summary. All I desire to point out here is, that in 
Lycidas Milton's original picturesque vein is for the first time 
crossed with one of quite another sort, stern, determined, obscurely 
indicative of suppressed passion, and the resolution to do or die. 
The fanaticism of the covenanter and the sad grace of Petrarch 
seem to meet in Milton's monod3^ Yet these opposites, instead of 
neutralising each other, are blended into one harrnonious whole by 
the presiding, but invisible, genius of the poet. The conflict be- 
tween the old cavalier world — the years of gaiety and festivity of a 
splendid and pleasure-loving court, and the new Puritan world into 
which love and pleasure were not to enter — this conflict which was 
commencing in the social life of England, is also begun in Milton's 
own breast, and is reflected in Lycidas. 



24 MILTON. 

'' For we were nurs'd upon the self -same hill." 

Here is the sweet mournfulness of the Spenserian time, upon 
whose joys Death is the only intruder. Pass onward a little, and 
you are in presence of the tremendous 

" Two-handed engine at the door," 

the terror of which is enhanced by its obscurity. We are very sure 
that the avenger is there, though we know not who he is. In 
these thirty lines we have the preluding mutterings of the storm 
which was to sweep away mask and revel and song, to inhibit the 
drama, and suppress poetry. In the earlier poems Milton's muse 
has sung in the tones of the age that is passing away ; except in 
his austere chastity, a cavalier. Though even in L Allegro Dr. 
Johnson truly detects " some melancholy in his mirth." In Lycidas, 
for a moment, the tones of both ages, the past and the coming, are 
combined, and then Milton leaves behind him forever the golden 
age, and one half of his poetic genius. He never fulfilled the 
promise with which Lycidas concludes, " lo-morrow to fresh fields 
and pastures new " 



MILTON, 



«5 



CHAPTER III. 

JOURNEY TO ITALY. 

Before 1632 Milton had begun to learn Italian. His mind, 
just then open on all sides to impressions from books, was 
peculiarly attracted by Italian poetry. The language grew to be 
loved for its own sake. Saturated with Dante and Petrarch, Tasso 
and Ariosto, the desire arose to let the ear drink in the music of 
Tuscan speech. 

The "unhappy gift of beauty," which has attracted the spoiler 
of all ages to the Italian peninsula, has ever exerted, and still 
exerts, a magnetic force on every cultivated mind. Manifold are 
the sources of this fascination now. The scholar and the artist, 
the antiquarian and the historian, the architect and the lover of 
natural scenery, alike find here the amplest gratification of their 
tastes. This is so still ; but in the sixteenth century the Italian 
cities were the only homes of an ancient and decaying civilisation. 
Not insensible to other impressions, it was specially the desire of 
social converse with the living poets and men of taste — a feeble 
generation, but one still nourishing the traditions of the- great 
poetic age — which drew Milton across the Alps. 

In April, 1637, Milton's mother had died; but his younger 
brother, Christopher, had come to live, with his wife, in the 
paternal home at Horton. Milton, the father, was not unwilling 
that his son should have his foreign tour, as a part of that elaborate 
education by which he was qualifying himself for his doubtful 
vocation. The cost was not to stand in the way, considerable as 
it must have been. Howell's estimate, in his Listructions for 
Forreine Travel (1642), was 300/. a year for the tourist himself, and 
50/. for his man, a sum equal to about 1000/. at present. 

Among the letters of introduction with which Milton provided 
himself, one was from the aged Sir Henry Wotton, Provost of 
Eton, in Milton's imm.ediate neighborhood. Sir Henry, who had 
lived a long time in Italy, impressed upon his young 'friend the 
importance of discreli.>:i on the point of religion, and told him the 
story which he alwa) .-, told to travellers who asked his advice. 
" At Siena I was tabled in the house of one Alberto Scipioni, an 

old Roman courtier in dangerous times Afmy departure 

for Rome I had won confidence enouoh to besf his advice how I 



26 MILTON. 

might carry myself securely there, without offence of others, or of 
mine own conscience. ' Signer Arrigo mio,' says he, ^pensieri 
stretti cd il ruiso sciolto (thoughts close, countenance open) will go 
safely over the whole world.' " Though the intensity of the 
Catholic reaction had somewhat relaxed in Italy, the deportment 
of a Protestant in the countries which were terrorised by the In- 
quisition was a matter which demanded much circumspection. 
Sir H. Wotton spoke from his own experience of far more rigorous 
times than those of the Barberini Pope. But he may have noticed, 
even in his brief acquaintance with Milton, a fearless presumption 
of speech which was just what was most likely to bring him into 
trouble. The event proved that the hint was not misplaced. For 
at Rome itself, in the very lion's den, nothing could content the 
young zealot but to stand up for his Protestant creed. Milton 
would not do as Peter Heylin did, who, when asked as to his 
religion, replied that he was a CathoHc, which, in a Laudian, was 
but a natural equivoque. Milton was resolute in his religion at 
Rome, so much so that many were deterred from showing him the 
civilities they were prepared to offer. His rule, he says, was "not 
of my own accord to introduce in those places conversation about 
religion, but, if interrogated respecting the faith, then, whatsoever 
I should suffer, to dissembla nothing. What I was, if any one 
asked, I concealed from no one ; if any one in the very city of the 
Pope attacked the orthodox religion, I defended it most freely." 
Beyond the statement that the English Jesuits were indignant, we 
hear of no evil consequences of this imprudence. Perhaps the 
Jesuits saw that Milton was of the stuff that would welcome 
martyrdom, and were sick of the affair of Calileo, which had ter- 
ribly damaged the pretensions of their Church. 

Milton arrived in Paris April or May, 1638. He received 
civiHties from the English ambassador, Lord Sligo, who at his re- 
quest gave him an introduction to Grotius. Grotius, says Phillips, 
" took Milton's visit kindly, and gave him entertainment suitable 
to his worth and the high commendations he had heard of him." 
We have no other record of his stay of many days in Paris, though 
A. Wood supposes that " the manners and graces of that place 
were not agreeable to his mind." It was August before he reached 
Florence, by way of Nice and Genoa, and in Florence he spent the 
two months which we now consider the most impossible there, the 
months of August and September. Nor did he find, as he would 
now, the city deserted by the natives. We hear nothing of 
Milton's impressions of the place, but of the men whom he met 
there he retained always a lively and affectionate remembrance. 
The learned and polite Florentines had not fled to the hills from 
the stifling heat and blinding glare of the Lung' Arno, but seem to 
have carried on their literary meetings in defiance of climate. 
This was the age of academies — an institution, Milton says, "of 
most praiseworthy effect, both for the cultivation of polite letters 
and the keeping up of friendships." Florence had five or six such 
societies, the Florentine, the Delia Crusca, the Svogliati, the 



MILTON. 27 

Apotisti, &c. It is easy, and usual in our day, to speak contempt- 
uously of the literary lone of these academies, fostering, as they 
did, an amiable and garrulous intercourse of reciprocal compliment, 
and to contrast them unfavorably with our societies for severe 
research. They were at least evidence of culture, and served to 
keep alive the traditions of the more masculine Medicean age. 
And that the members of these associations were not unaware of 
their own degeneracy and of its cause, we learn from Milton him- 
self. For as soon as they found that they were safe with the 
young Briton, they disclosed their own bitter hatred of the 
Church's yoke which they had to bear. " I have sate among their 
learned men," Milton wrote in 1644, "and been counted happy to 
be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed 
England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile 
condition into which learning amongst them was brought, that this 
was it which had dampt the glory o"f Italian wits that nothing had 
been written there now these many years but flattery and fustian." 
Milton was introduced at the meetings of their academies ; his 
presence is recorded on two occasions, of which the latest is the 
1 6th September at the Syogliati. He paid his scot by reciting 
from memory some of his youthful Latin verses, hexameters, 
"molto erudite," says the minute-book of the sitting, and others, 
which " I shifted, in the scarcity of books and conveniences, 
to patch up." He obtained much credit by these exercises, which, 
indeed, deserved it by comparison. He ventured upon the perilous 
experiment of offering some compositions in Italian, which the fas- 
tidious Tuscan ear at least professed to include in those " enco- 
miums which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this 
side the Alps." 

The author of Lycidas cannot but have been quite aware of the 
small poetical merit of such an ode as that which was addressed to 
him by Francini. In this ode Milton is the swan of Thames — 
" Thames, which, owing to thee, rivals Boeotian Permessus ; " and 
so forth. But there is a genuine feeling, an ungrudging warmth of 
sympathetic recognition underlying the trite and tumid panegyric. 
And Milton may have yie.'ded to the not unnatural impulse of show- 
ing his countrymen that though not a prophet in boorish and fana- 
tical England, he had founa recognition in the home of letters and 
arts. Upon us is forced, by this their different reception of Mil- 
ton, the contrast between the two countries, Italy and England, in 
the middle of the seventeenth century. The rude North, whose 
civilisation was all to come, concentrating all its intelligence in a 
violent effort to work off the ecclesiastical poison from its system, is 
brought into sharp contrast with the sweet South, whose civilisation 
is behind it, and whose intellect, after a severe struggle, has suc- 
cumbed to the material force and organisation of the Church. 

As soon as the season allowed of it, Milton set forward to Rome, 
taking what was then the usual way by Siena. At Rome he spent 
two months, occupying himself partly with seeing the antiquities, 
and partly with cultivating the acquaintance of natives, and some 



28 MILTON. 

of the many foreigners resident in the eternal city. But though 
he received much civihty, we do not find that he met with the 
pecuhar sympathy which endeared to him his Tuscan friends. His 
chief ally was the German, Lucas Holstenius, a native of Ham- 
burg, who had abjured Protestantism to become librarian of the 
Vatican. Holstenius had resided three years in Oxford, and con- 
sidered himself bound to repay to the English scholar some of the 
attentions he had received himself. Through Holstenius Mtlton 
was presented to the nephew, Francesco Barberini, who was just 
then everything in Rome. It was at a concert at the Barberini 
palace that Milton heard Leonora Baroni sing. His three Latin 
epi^^-ams addressed to this lady, the first singer of Italy, or of the 
world at that time, testify to the enthusiasm she excited in the 
muscial soul of Milton. 

Nor are these three epigrams the only homage which Milton 
paid to Italian beauty. The susceptible poet, who in the sunless 
North would fain have "sported with the tangles of Neeera's 
hair," could not behold Nesera herself, and the flashing splen- 
dour of her eye, unmoved. Milton proclaims {Defensio Seciuida) 
that in all his foreign tour he had lived clear from all that is 
disgraceful. But the pudicity of his behaviour and language 
covers a soul tremulous with emotion, whose passion was in- 
tensified by the discipline of a chaste intention. Five Italian 
pieces among his poems are to the address of another lady 
whose " majestic movements and love-darting dark brow " had sub- 
dued him. The charm lay in the novelty of this style of beauty to 
one who came from the land of the " vermeil-tinctur'd cheek " 
{Coimis) and the '^golden nets of hair" [EL i. 60). No clue has 
been discovered to the name of this divinity, or to the occasion on 
which Milton saw her. 

Of Milton's impressions of Rome there is no record. There 
are no traces of special observation in his poetry. The descrip- 
tion of the city in Paradise Regained (iv. 32) has nothing charac- 
teristic, and could have been written by one who had never seen 
it, and by many as well as by Milton. We get one glimpse of him 
by aid of the register of the English College, as dining there at a 
"sumptuous entertainment" on 30th October, when he met Nich- 
olas Carey, brother of Lord Falkland. In spite of Sir Henry Wot- 
ton's caution, his resoluteness, as A. Wood calls it, in his religion, 
besides making the English Jesuits indignant, caused others, not 
Jesuits, to withhold civilities. Milton only tells us himself that 
the antiquities detained him in Rome about two months. 

At the end of November he went to Naples. On the road he 
fell in with an Eremite friar, who gave him an introduction to the 
one man in Naples whom it was important he should know, Gio- 
vanni Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa. The marquis, now 
seventy-eight, had been for two generations the Maecenas of letters 
in Southern Italy. He had sheltered Tasso in the former genera- 
tion, and Marini in the latter. It was the singular privilege of his 
old age that he should now entertain a third poet, greater than 



MILTON. 20 

either. In spite of his years, he was able to act as cicerone to the 
young Englishman over the scenes which he himself, in his Life of 
Tasso, has described with the enthusiasm of a poet. But even the 
high-souled Manso quailed before the terrors of the Inquisition, 
and apologised to Milton for not having shown him greater atten- 
tion, because he would not be more circumspect in the matter of 
religion. Milton's Italian journey brings out the two conflicting 
strains of feeling which were uttered together \nLycidas, the poet's 
impressibility by nature, the freeman's indignation at clerical dom- 
ination. 

The time was now at hand when the latter passion, the noble 
rage of freedom, was to suppress the more delicate flower of poetic 
imagination. Milton's original scheme had included Sicily and 
Greece, The serious aspect of affairs at home compelled him to 
renounce his project. " I considered it dishonourable to be enjoy- 
ing myself at my ease in foreign lands, while my countrymen were 
striking a blow for freedom." He retraced his steps leisurely 
enough, however, making a halt of two months in Rome, and again 
one of two months in Florence. We find him mentioned in the 
minutes of the academy of the Svogliati as having been present at 
three of their weekly meetings, on the 17th, 24th, and 31st March. 
But the most noteworthy incident of his second Florentine residence 
is his interview with Galileo. He had been unable to see the 
veteran martyr of science on his first visit. For though GaHleo 
was at that time living within the walls, he was kept a close pris- 
oner by the Inquisition, and not allowed either to set foot outside 
his own door, or to receive visits from non-Catholics. In the spring 
of 1639, however, he was allowed to go back to his villa at Gioiella, 
near Arcetri, and Milton obtained admission to him, old, frail, and 
blind, but in full possession of his mental faculty. There is ob- 
servable in Milton, as Mr. Masson suggests, a prophetic fascina- 
tion of the fancy on the subject of blindness. And the deep im- 
pression left by this sight of "the Tuscan artist" is evidenced by 
the feeling with which Galileo's name and achievement are im- 
bedded in Paradise Lost. 

From Florence, Milton crossed the Apennines by Bologna and 
Ferrara to Venice. From this port he shipped for England the 
books he had collected during his tour, books curious and rare as 
they seemed to Phillips, and among them a chest or two of choice 
music books. The month of April was spent at Venice, and bid- 
ding farewell to the beloved land he would never visit again, Milton 
passed the Alps to Geneva. 

No Englishman's foreign pilgrimage was complete without touch- 
ing at this m.arvellous capital of the reformed faith, which with 
almost no resources had successfully braved the whole might of 
the Catholic reaction. The only record of Milton's stay at Geneva 
is the album of a Neapolitan refugee, to which Milton contributed 
his autograph, under date loth June 1639, with the following quo- 
tation : — 



20 MILTON. 

" If virtue feeble were, 
Heaven itself would stoop to her." 

(From Comus. 
" Coelum non animum muto, dum trans mare curro." 

(From Horace.) 

But it is probable that he was a guest in the house of one of the 
leading pastors, Giovanni Diodati, whose nephew Charles, a phy- 
sician commencing practice in London, was Milton's bosom friend. 
Here Milton first heard of the death, in the previous August, of 
that friend. It was a heavy blow to him, for one of the chief pleas- 
sures of being at home again would have been to pour into a sym- 
pathetic Itahan ear the story of his adventures. The sadness of 
the homeward journey from Geneva is recorded for us in the 
Epitaphiuin Da?nonis. This piece is an elegy to the memory of 
Charles Diodati. It unfortunately differs from the elegy on King 
in being written in Latin, and is thus inaccessible to uneducated 
readers. As to such readers the topic of Milton's Latin poetry is 
necessarily an ungrateful subject, I will dismiss it here with one 
remark. Milton's Latin verses are distinguished from most Neo- 
latin verse by being a vehicle of real emotion. His technical skill 
is said to have been surpassed by others ; but that in which he 
stands alone is, that in these exercises of imitative art he is able to 
remain himself, and to give utterance to genuine passion. Arti- 
ficial Arcadianism is as much the framework of the elegy on Dio- 
dati as it is of Lycidas. We have Daphnis and Bion, Tityrus and 
Amyntas for characters, Sicilian valleys for scenery, while Pan, 
Pales, and the Fauns represent the supernatural. The shepherds 
defend their flocks from wolves and lions. But this factitious bu- 
colicisim is pervaded by a pathos which, like volcanic heat, has 
fused into a new compound the dilapidated debris of the Theo- 
critean world. And in the Latin elegy there is more tenderness 
than in the English. Charles Diodati was much nearer to Milton 
than had been Edward King. The sorrow in Lycidas is not so 
much personal as it is the regret of the society of Christ's. King 
had only been known to Milton as one of the students of the same 
college ; Diodati was the associate of his choice in riper manhood. 
The Epitaphhnn Danwnis is further memorable as Milton's 
last attempt in serious Latin verse. He discovered in this experi- 
ment that Latin was not an adequate vehicle of the feeling he 
desired to give vent to. In the concluding lines he takes a formal 
farewell of the Latian muse, and announces his purpose of adopt- 
ing henceforth the "harsh and grating Brittonic idiom " {BrittonU 
cum stridens). 



31 



SECOND PERIOD. 1640— 1660. 
CHAPTER IV. 

EDUCATIONAL THEORY — TEACHING. ' 

Milton was back in England in August, 1639. He had been 
absent a year and three months, during which space of time the 
aspect of public affairs, which had been perplexed and gloomy 
when he left, had been growing still more ominous of a coming 
storm. The issues of the controversy were so pervasive that it 
was almost impossible for any educated man who understood them 
not to range himself on a side. Yet Milton, though he had broken 
off his projected tour in consequence, did not rush into the fray on 
his return. He resumed his retired and studious life, "with no 
small delight, cheerfully leaving," as he says, " the event of public 
affairs first to God, and then to those to whom the people had com- 
mitted that task." 

He did not return to Horton, but took lodgings in London, in 
the house of Russel, a tailor, in St. Bride's churchyard, at the city 
end of Fleet Street, on the site of what is now Farringdon Street. 
There is no attempt on the part of Milton to take up a profession, 
not even for the sake of appearances. The elder Milton was con- 
tent to provide the son, of whom he was proud, with the means of 
prosecuting his eccentric scheme of life, to continue, namely, to 
prepare himself for some great work, nature unknown. 

For a young man of simple habits and studious life a little 
suffices. The chief want is books, and of these, for Milton's style 
of reading, select rather than copious, a large collection is super- 
fluous. There were in 1640 no public libraries in London, and 
a scholar had to find his own store of books or to borrow from his 
friends. Milton never can have possessed a large library. At 
Horton he may have used Kederminster's bequest to Langley 
Church. Still, with his Italian acquisitions, added to the books 
that he already possessed, he soon found a lodging too narrow for 
his accommodation, and removed to a house of his own, " a pretty 
garden-house, in Aldersgate, at the end of an entry." Aldersgate 
was outside the city walls, on the verge of the open country of 
Islington, and was a genteel though not a fashionable quarter. 



32 MILTON. 

There were few streets in London, says Phillips, more free from 
noise. 

He had taken in hand the education of his two nephews, John 
and Edward Phillips, sons of his only sister Anne. Anne was a 
few years older than her brother John. Her first husband, Edward 
Phillips, had died in 1631, and the widow had given her two sons a 
step-father in one Thomas Agar, who was in the Clerk of the 
Crown's office. Milton, on settHngin London in 1639, ^"^^ ^.t once 
taken his younger nephew John to live with him. When, in 1640, 
he removed to Aidersgate, the elder, Edward, also came under his 
roof. 

If it was affection for his sister which first moved Milton to 
undertake the tuition of her sons, he soon developed a taste for the 
occupation. In 1643 h^ began to receive into his house other 
pupils, but only, says Phillips (who is solicitous that his uncle 
should not be thought to have kept a school), " the sons of some 
gentlemen that were his intimate friends." He threw into his 
lessons the same energy which he carried into everything else. In 
his eagerness to find a place for everything that could be learnt, 
there could have been few hours in the day which were not invaded 
by teaching. He had exchanged the contemplative leisure of 
Horton for a busy hfe, in which no hour but had its calls. Even 
on Sundaj'^s there were lessons in the Greek Testament and dicta- 
tions of a system of Divinity in Latin. His pamphlets of this 
period betray, in their want of measure and equihbrium, even in 
their heated style and passion-flushed language, the hfe at high 
pressure which their author was leading. 

We have no account of Milton's method of teaching from any 
competent pupil, Edward Phillips was an amiable and upright 
man, who earned his living respectably by tuition and the com- 
pilation of books. He held his uncle's memory in great veneration. 
But when he comes to describe the education he received at his 
uncle's hands, the only characteristic on which he dwells is that of 
quantity. Phillips's account is, however, supplemented for us by 
Milton's written theory. His Tractate of Educatio7i to Master 
Sajjiuel Haj'tlib is probably known even to those who have never 
looked at anything else of Milton's in prose. 

Of all the practical arts, that of education seems the most cum- 
brous in its method, and to be productive of the smallest result 
with the most lavish expenditure of means. Hence the subject of 
education is one which is always luring on the innovator and the 
theorist. Every one, as he grows up, becomes aware of time lost, 
and effort misapplied, in his own case. It is not unnatural to 
desire to save our children from a like waste of power. And in a 
time such as was that of Milton's youth, when all traditions were 
being questioned, and all institutions were to be remodelled, it was 
certain that the school would be among the earliest objects to 
attract an experimental reformer. Among the advanced minds of 
the time there had grown up a deep dissatisfaction with the received 
methods of our schools, and more especially of our universities. 



MILTON, 3, 

The great instaurator of all knowledge, Bacon, in prea^^'ng th^^ 
necessity of altering the whole method of knowing, iivjluded as 
matter of course the method of teaching to know. 

The man who carried over the Baconian aspiration into educa- 
tion was Comenius (d. 1670). A projector and enthusiast, Com- 
enius desired, like Bacon, an entirely new intellectual era. With 
Bacon's intellectual ambition, but without Bacon's capacity, 
Comenius proposed to revolutionise all knowledge and to 
make complete wisdom accessible to all, in a brief space of time, 
and with a minimum of labour. Language only as an in- 
strument, not as an end in itself ; many living languages, instead of 
the one dead language of the old school ; a knowledge of things, 
instead of words ; the free use of our eyes and ears upon the nature 
that surrounds us ; intelligent apprehension, instead of loading the 
memory — all these doctrines, afterwards inherited by the party of 
rational reform, were first promulgated in Europe by the numerous 
pamphlets — some ninety have been reckoned up — of this Teuto- 
Slav, Comenius. 

Comenius had as the champion of his views in England Samuel 
Hartlib, a Dantziger by origin, settled in London since 1628. Hart- 
lib had even less of real science than Comenius, but he was equally 
possessed by the Baconian ideal of a new heaven and a new earth 
of knowledge. Not himself a discoverer in any branch, he was 
unceasingly occupied in communicating the discoveries and inven- 
tions of others. He had an ear for every novelty of whatever kind, 
interesting himself in social, religious, philanthropic schemes, as 
well as in experiments in the arts. A sanguine universality of 
benevolence pervaded that generation of ardent souls, akin only in 
their common anticipation of an unknown Utopia. A secret was 
within the reach of human ingenuity which would make all man- 
kind happy. But there were two directions more especially in 
which Hartlib's zeal without knowledge abounded. These were a 
grand scheme for the union of Protestant Christendom, and his 
propagand of Comenius's school-reform. 

For the first of these projects it was not likely that Hartlib 
would gain a proselyte in Milton, who had at one-and-twenty judged 
Anglican orders a servitude, and was already chafing against the 
restraints of Presbytery. But on his other hobby, that of school- 
reform, Milton was not only sympathetic, but when Hartlib came 
to talk with him, he found that most or all of Comenius's ideas had 
already independently presented themselves to the reflection or 
experience of the Englishman. At Hartlib's request Milton con- 
sented to put down his thoughts on paper, and even to print them 
in a quarto pamphlet of eight pages, entitled. Of Education : to 
Master Sa7nuel Hartlib. 

This tract, often reproduced and regarded, along with one of 
Locke's, as a substantial contribution to the subject, must often 
have grievously disappointed those who have eagerly consulted it 
for practical hints or guidance of any kind. Its interest is wholly 
biographical. It cannot be regarded as a valuable contribution to 

3 



24 . MILTON. 

educational theory, but it is strongly marked with the Miltonic 
individuality. We find in it the same lofty conception of the aim 
which Milton carried into everything he attempted; the same dis- 
dain of the beaten routine, and prouci reliance upon his own 
resources. He had given vent elsewhere to his discontent with the 
system of Cambridge, " which, as in the time of her better health, 
and my own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, so now 
(1642) much less." In the letter to Harthb he denounces with 
equal fierceness the schools and " the many mistakes which have 
made learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuccessful." The 
alumni of the" universities carry away with them a hatred and con- 
tempt for learning, and sink into " ignorantly zealous " clergymen, 
or mercenary lawyers, while the men of fortune betake themselves 
to feasts and jollity. These last, Milton thinks, are the best of the 
three classes. 

All these moral shipwrecks are the consequence, according to 
Milton, of bad education. It is in our power to avert them by a 
reform of schools. But the measures of reform, when produced, 
are ludicrously incommensurable with the evils to be remedied. I 
do not trouble the reader with recounting the proposals ; they are 
only a form of the well-known educational fallacy— the communica- 
tion of useful knowledge. The doctrine as propounded in the 
Tractate is complicated by the further difficulty that the knowledge 
is to be gathered out of Greek and Latin books. This doctrine is 
advocated by Milton with the ardour of his own lofty enthusiasm. 
In virtue of the grandeur of zeal which inspires them, these pages, 
which are in substance nothing more than the now famihar omni- 
scient examiner's programme, retain a place as one of our classics. 
The fine definition of education here given has never been im- 
proved upon : '' I call a complete and generous education that 
which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously 
all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war." This 
is the true Milton. When he offers, in another page, as equivalent 
a definition of the true end of learning, " to repair the ruin of our 
first parents by regaining to know God aright," we have the theo- 
logical Milton, and what he took on from the current language of 
his age. 

Milton saw strongly, as many have done before and since, one 
weak point in the practice of schools, namely, the small result of 
much time. He fell into the natural error of the inexperienced 
teacher, that of supposing that the remedy was the ingestion of 
much and diversified intelligible matter. It requires much obser- 
vation of voung minds to discover that the rapid inculcation of un- 
assimilated information stupefies the faculties instead of training 
them. Is it fanciful to think that in Edward Phillips, who was 
always employing his superficial pen upon topics with which he 
snatched a fugitive acquaintance, we have a concrete example of 
the natural result of the Miltonic system of instruction ? 



MILTON. 



%h 



CHAPTER V. 

MARRIAGE, AND PAMPHLETS ON DIVORCE. 

We have seen that Milton turned back from his unaccom- 
pHshed tour because he "deemed it disgraceful to be idling away 
his time abroad for his own gratification, while his countrymen 
were contending for their liberty." From these words biographers 
have inferred that he hurried home with the view of taking service 
in the Parliamentarian army. This interpretation of his words 
seems to receive confirmation from what Phillips thinks he had 
heard, — " I am much mistaken if there were not about this time a 
design in agitation of making him Adjutant-General in Sir William 
Waller's army." Phillips very likely thought that a recruit could 
enlist as an Adjutant-General, but it does not appear from Milton's 
own words that he himself ever contemplated service in the field. 
The words "contending for Hberty " (de hbertate dimicarent) could 
not, as said of the winter 1638-39, mean anything more than the 
strife of party. And when war did break out, it must have been 
obvious to Milton that he could scive the cause better as a scholar 
than as a soldier. 

That he never took service in the army is certain. If there was 
a time when he should have been found in the ranks, it was on the 
1 2th November, 1642, when every able-bodied citizen turned out 
to oppose the march of the king, who had advanced to Brentford. 
But we have the evidence of the sonnet — 

"Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in arms," 

that Milton, on this occasion, stayed at home. He had, as he an- 
nounced in February, 1642, "taken labour and intent study " to be 
his portion in this Hfe, He did not contemplate enlisting his pen 
in the service of the ParHament, but the exaltation of his country's 
glory by the composition of some monument of the English lan- 
guage, as Dante or Tasso had done for Itahan. But a project 
ambitious as this lay too far off to be put in execution as soon as 
thought of. The ultimate purpose had to give place to the imme- 
diate. One of these interludes, originating in Milton's personal 
relations, was his series of tracts on divorce. 

In the early part of the summer of 1643, Milton took a sudden 
journey into the country, " nobody about him certainly knowing 



j6 MILTON. 

the reason, or that it was any more than a journey of recreation." 
He was absent about a month, and when he returned he brought 
back a wife with him. Nor was the bride alone. She was attended 
*' by some few of her nearest relations," and there was feasting and 
Celebration of the nuptials in the house in Aldersgate Street. 

The bride's name was Mary, eldest daughter of Richard Powell, 
Esq., of Poorest Hill, J. P. for the county of Oxford. Forest Hill 
is a village and parish about five miles from Oxford on the Thame 
road, where Mr. Powell had a house and a small estate of some 
300/. a year, value of that day. Forest Hill was within the ancient 
royal forest of Shotover, of which Mr. Powell was lessee. The 
reader will remember that the poet's father was born at Stanton 
St. John, the adjoining parish to Forest Hill, and that Richard 
Milton, the grandfather, had been under-ranger of the royal forest. 
There had been many transactions between the Milton and the 
Powell famihes as far back as 1627. In paying a visit to that 
.neighborhood, Milton was both returning to the district which had 
been the home of all the Miltons, and renewing an old acquaint- 
ance with the Powell family. Mr. Powell, though in receipt of a 
fair income for a country gentleman— 300/. a year of that day may 
be roughly valued at 1000/. of our day— and his wife had brought 
him 3000/., could not live within his means. His children were 
numerous, and, belonging to the cavalier party, his house was con- 
ducted with the careless and easy hospitality of a royalist gentle- 
man. Twenty years before he had begun borrowing, and among 
other persons had had recourse to the prosperous and saving 
scrivener of Bread Street. He was already mortgaged to the Mil- 
tons, father and sons, more deeply than his estate had any prospect 
of paying, which was perhaps the reason why he found no difficulty 
in promising a portion of 1000/. with his daughter. Milton, with a 
poet's want of caution, or indifference to money, and with a lofty 
masculine disregard of the temper and character of the girl he 
asked to share his life, came home with his bride in triumph, and 
held feasting in celebration of his hasty and ill-considered choice. 
It was a beginning of sorrows to him. Hitherto, up to his thirty- 
fifth year, independent master of leisure and the delights of Hter- 
ature', his years had passed without a check or a shadow. From 
this day forward domestic misery, the importunities of business, 
the clamour of controversy, crowned by the crushing calamity of 
blindness, were to be his portion for more than thirty years. 
Singular among poets in the serene fortune of the first half of life, 
in the second half his piteous fate was to rank in wretchedness 
with that of his masters, Dante or Tasso. 

The biographer, acquainted with the event, has no difficulty in 
predicting it, and in saying at this point in his story that Milton 
might have known better than, with his puritanical connexions, to 
have taken to wife a daughter of a cavalier house, to have brought 
her from a roystering home, frequented by the dissolute officers of 
the Oxford garrison, to the spare diet and philosophical retirement 
of a recluse student, and to have looked for sympathy and response 



MILTON-. 



37 



for his speculations from an uneducated and frivolous girl. Love 
has blinded, and will continue to blind, the wisest men to calcula- 
tions as easy and as certain as these. And Milton, in whose soul 
Puritan austerity was as yet only contending with the more genial 
currents of humanity, had a far greater than average susceptibility 
to the charm of woman. Even at the later date of Paradise Lost^ 
voluptuous thoughts, as Mr. Hallam has observed, are not uncon- 
genial to him. And at an earlier age his poems, candidly pure 
from the lascivious innuendoes of his contemporaries, have pre- 
served the record of the rapid impression of the momentary passage 
of beauty upon his susceptible mind. Once, at twenty, he was all 
on flame by the casual meeting, in one of his walks in the suburbs 
of London, with a damsel whom he never saw again. Again, 
sonnets iii. to v. tell how he fell before the new type of foreign 
beauty which crossed his path at Bologna. A similar surprise of 
his fancy at the expense of his judgment seems to have happened 
on the present occasion of his visit to Shotover. There is no 
evidence tliat Mary Powell was handsome, and we may be sure 
that it would have been mentioned if she had been. But she had 
youth and country freshness ; her " unlivehness and natural sloth 
unfit for conversation " passed as " the bashful muteness of a 
virgin ; " and if a doubt intruded that he was being too hasty, 
Milton may have thought that a girl of seventeen could be moulded 
at pleasure. 

He was too soon undeceived. His dream of married happiness 
barely lasted the honeymoon. He found that he had mated him- 
self to a clod of earth, who not only was not now, but had not the 
capacity of becoming, a helpmate for him. With Milton, as with 
the whole Calvinistic and Puritan Europe, woman was a creature 
of an inferior and subordinate class. Man was the final cause of 
God's creation, and woman was there to minister to this nobler 
being. In his dogmatic treatise De Doctrina Chj^isHana, Milton 
formulated this sentiment ia the thesis, borrowed from the school- 
men, that the soul was communicated "in semine patris." The 
cavalier section of society had inherited the sentiment of chivalry, 
and contrasted with the roundhead not more by its loyalty to the 
person of the prince, than by its recognition of the superior grace 
and refinement of womanhood. Even in the debased and degenerate 
epoch of court life which followed 1660, the forms and language of 
homage still preserved the tradition of a nobler scheme of manners. 
The Puritan had thrown off chivalry as being parcel of Catholicism, 
and had replaced it by the Hebrew ideal of the subjection and 
seclusion of woman. Milton, in whose mind the rigidity of Puritan 
doctrine was now contending with the freer spirit of culture and 
romance, shows on the present occasion a like conflict of doctrine 
with sentiment. While he adopts the Oriental hyi^oi-iicsis of 
woman for the sake of man, he molifies it by laying more stress 
upon mutual affection, the charities of home, and the intercom- 
munion of intellectual and moral life, than upon the ministration 
of woman to the appetite and comforts of man which makes up the 



3$ MILTON. 

whole of her functions in the Puritan apprehension. The failure 
in his own case to obtain this genial companionship of soul, which 
he calls " the gentlest end of marriage," is what gave the keenest 
edge to his disappointment in his matrimonial venture. 

But however keenly he felt and regretted the precipitancy which 
had yoked him for life to " a mute and spiritless mate," the breach 
did not come from his side. The girl herself conceived an equal 
repugnance to the husband she had thoughtlessly accepted, prob- 
ably on the strength of his good looks, which was all of Milton 
that she was capable of appreciating. A young bride, taken 
suddenly from the freedom of a jovial and an undisciplined home, 
rendered more lax by civil confusion and easy intercourse with 
the officers of the royalist garrison, and committed to the sole 
society of a stranger, and that stranger possessing the rights of a 
husband, and expecting much from all who lived with him, may 
not unnaturally have been seized with panic terror, and wished her- 
self home again. The young Mrs. Milton not only wished it, but 
Incited her family to write and beg that she might be allowed to go 
home to stay the remainder of the summer. The request to quit 
her husband at the end of the first month was so unreasonable that 
the parents would hardly have made it if they had not suspected 
some profound cause of estrangement. Nor could Milton have 
consented, as he did, to so extreme a remedy, unless he had felt 
that the case required no less, and that her mother's advice and 
influence were the most available means of awakening his wife to 
a sense of her duty. Milton's consent was therefore given. He 
may have thought it desirable she should go, and thus Mrs. Powell 
would not have been going very much beyond the truth when she 
pretended some years afterwards that her son-in-law had turned 
away his wife for a long space. 

Mary Milton went to Forest Hill in July, but on the under 
standing that she was to come back at Michaelmas. When the 
appointed time came, she did not appear. Milton wrote for her to 
come. No answer. Several other letters met the same fate. At 
last he despatched a foot messenger to Forest Hill desiring her re- 
turn. The messenger came back only to report that he had been 
" dismissed with some sort of contempt. " It was evident that Mary 
Milton's family had espoused her cause as against her husband. 
Whatever may have been the secret motive of their conduct, they 
explained the quarrel politically and began to repent, so Phillips 
thought, of having matched the eldest daughter of their house with 
a violent Presbyterian. 

If Milton had "hasted too eagerly to light the nuptial torch,*' he 
had been equally ardent in his calculations of the domestic happi- 
ness upon which he was to enter. His poet's imagination had 
invested a dull and common girl with rare attributes moral and in- 
tellectual, and had pictured for him the state of matrimony as an 
earthly paradise, in which he was to be secure of a response of 
affection showing itself in a communion of intelligent interests. In 
proportion to the brilliancy of his ideal anticipation was the fury of 



MILTON. 



39 



despair which came upon him when he found out his mistake. A 
common man, in a common age, would have vented liis vexation 
upon the individual. Milton, living at a time when controversy 
turned away from details, and sought to dig down to the roots of 
every question, instead of urging the hardsliips of his own case, 
set to to consider the institution of marriage in itself. He published 
a pamphlet with the title, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 
at first anonymously, but putting his name to a second edition, 
much enlarged. He further reinforced this argument in chief with 
three supplementary pamphlets, partly in answer to opponents and 
objectors ; for there was no lack of opposition, indeed of outcry loud 
and fierce. 

A biographer closely scans the pages of these pamphlets, not for 
the sake of their direct argument, but to see if he can extract from 
them any indirect hints of their author's personal relations. There 
is found in them no mention of Milton's individual case. Had we 
no other information, we should not be authorised to infer from 
them that the question of the marriage tie was more than an ab- 
stract question with the author. 

But though all mention of his own case is studiously avoided 
by Milton, his pamphlet, when read by the light of Phillips's brief 
narrative, does seem to give some assistance in apprehending the 
circumstances of this obscure passage of the poet's life. The 
mystery has always been felt by the biographers, but has assumed 
a darker hue since the discovery by Mr, Masson of a copy of the 
first edition of The Dociri?te and Discipline of Divorce, with the 
written date of August i. According to PhiUips's narrative, the 
pamphlet was engendered by Milton's indignation at his wife's con- 
temptuous treatment of him, in refusing to keep the engagement to 
return at Michaelmas, and would therefore be composed in Oc- 
tober and November, time enough to allow for the sale of the 
edition, and the preparation of the enlarged edition, which came 
out in February, 1644. But if the date " August i " for the first 
edition be correct, we have to suppose that Milton was occupying 
himself with the composition of a vehement and impassioned argu- 
ment in favor of divorce for incompatibility of temper during the 
honeymoon ! Such behaviour on Milton's part, he being thirty- 
five, towards a girl of seventeen, to whom he was bound to show 
all loving tenderness, is so horrible that a suggestion has been 
made that there was a more adequate cause for his displeasure, a 
suggestion which Milton's biographer is bound to notice, even if 
he does not adopt it. The suggestion, which I believe was first 
made by a writer in the Athencenin, is that Milton's young wife 
refused him the consummation of the marriage. The supposition is 
founded upon a certain passage in Milton's pamphlet. 

If the early date of the pamphlet be the true date ; if the Doc- 
trine and Discipline was in the hands of the public on August i ; 
if Milton was brooding over this seething agony of passion all 
through July, with the young bride, to whom he had been barely 
wedded a month, in the house where he was writing, then the only 



40 MILTON. 

apology for this outrage upon the charities, not to say decencies 
of home is tl. '" which is suggested by the passage referred to. 
Then the paniphlet, however imprudent, becomes pardonable. It 
is a passionate cry from the depths of a great despair ; another 
evidence of the noble purity of a nature which refused to console 
itself as other men would have consoled themselves ; a nature 
which, instead of an egotistical whine for its own deliverance, sets 
itself to plead the common cause of man and of society. He gives 
no intimation of any individual interest, but his argument through- 
out glows with a white heat of concealed emotion, such as could 
only be stirred by the sting of some personal and present misery. 

Notwithstanding the amount of free opinion abroad in England, 
or at least in London, at this date, Milton's divorce pamphlets 
created a sensation of that sort which Gibbon is fond of calling a 
scandal. A scandal in this sense, must always arise in your own 
party ; you cannot scandalise the enemy. And so it was now. 
The Episcopalians were rejoiced that Milton should ruin his credit 
with his own side by advocating a paradox. The Presbyterians 
hastened to disown a man who enabled their opponents to brand 
their religious scheme as the parent of moral heresies. For though 
church government and the English constitution in all its parts had 
begun to be open questions, speculation had not as yet attacked either 
of the two bases of society, property or the family. Loud was the 
outcry of the Philistines. There was no doubt that the rigid bonds 
of Presbyterian orthodoxy would not in any case have long held 
Milton. They were snapped at once by the publication of his 
opinions on divorce, and Milton is henceforward to be ranked 
among the most independent of the new party which shortly after 
this date began to be heard of under the name of Independents. 

But the men who formed the nucleus of this new mode of think- 
ing were as yet, in 1643, not consolidated into a sect, still less was 
their importance as the coming political party dreamt of. At pres- 
ent they were units, only drawn to each other by the sympathy of 
opinion. The contemptuous epithets Anabaptist, Antinomian, &c., 
could be levelled against them with fatal effect by every PhiHstine, 
and were freely used on this occasion against Milton. He says of 
himself that he now lived in a world of disesteem. Nor was there 
wanting, to complete his discomfiture, the practical parody of the 
doctrine of divorce. A Mistress Attaway, lacewoman in Bell 
Alley, and she-preacher in Coleman Street, had been reading 
Master Milton's book, and remembered that she had an unsancti"- 
fied husband, who did not speak the language of Canaan. She 
further reflected that Mr. Attaway was not only unsanctified, but 
was also absent with the army, while William Jenney was on the 
spot, and, like herself, also a preacher. Could a " scandalised " 
Presbyterian help pointing the finger of triumphant scorn at such 
examples, the natural fruits of that mischievous book, The Doctrme 
a7id Disciplme ? 

Beyond the stage of scandal and disesteem the matter did not 
proceed. In dedicating The Doctrine and Discipline to the Parlia- 



MILTON. 



41 



ment, Milton had specially called on that assembly to legislate for 
the relief of men who were encumbered with unsuitable spouses. 
No notice was taken of this appeal, as there was far other work on 
hand, and no particular pressure from without in the direction of 
Milton's suit. Divorce for incompatibility of temper remained his 
private crotchet, or obtained converts only among his fellow-suffer- 
ers, who, however numerous, did not form a body important 
enough to enforce by clamour their demand for relief. 

Milton was not very well pleased to find that the Parliament 
had no ear for the bitter cry of distress wrung from their ardent 
admirer and staunch adherent. Accordingly, in 1645, in dedicating 
the last of the divorce pamphlets, which he entitled Tetracliordon^ 
to the Parliament, he concluded with a threat, " If the law makes 
not a timely provision, let the law, as reason is, bear the censure of 
the consequences." 

This threat he was prepared to put in execution, and did, in 
1645, as Phillips tells us, contemplate a union, which could not 
have been a marriage, with another woman. He was able at this 
time to find some part of that solace of conversation which his wife 
failed to give him, among his female acquaintances. Especially 
we find him at home in the house of one of the Parliamentary 
women, the Lady Margaret Ley, a lady " of great wit and inge- 
nuity," the ''honoured Margaret" of Sonnet x. But the Lady 
Margaret was a married woman, being the wife of a Captain Hob- 
son, a "very accomplished gentleman," of the Isle of Wight. The 
young lady who was the object of his attentions, and who, if she 
were the "virtuous young lady" of Sonnet ix., was "in the prime 
of earliest youth," was a daughter of Dr. Davis, of whom nothing 
else is now known. She is described by Philhps, who may have 
seen her, as a very handsome and witty gentlewoman. Though 
Milton was ready to brave public opinion, Miss Davis was not 
And so the suit hung, when all schemes of the kind were put an 
end to by the unexpected submission of Mary Powell. 

Since October, 1643, when Milton's messenger had been dis- 
missed from Forest Hill, the face of the civil struggle was changed. 
The Presbyterian army had been replaced by that of the Indepen- 
dents, and the immediate consequence had been the decline of the 
royal cause, consummated by its total ruin on the day of Naseby, 
in June, 1645. Oxford was closely invested. Forest Hill occupied 
by the besiegers, and the Powell family compelled to take refuge 
within the lines of the city. Financial bankruptcy, too, had over- 
taken the Powell's. These influences, rather than any rumours 
which may have reached them of Milton's designs in regard to 
Miss Davis, wrought a change in the views of the Powell family. 
By the triumph of the Independents Mr. Milton was become a man 
of consideration, and might be useful as a protector. They con- 
cluded that the best thing they could do was to seek a reconcilia- 
tion. There were not wanting friends of Milton's also, some per- 
haps divining his secret discontent, who thought that such recon 
ciliation would be better for him too, than perilling his happiness 



4« 



MILTON. 



upon the experiment of an illegal connexion. A conspiracy of the 
friends of both parties contrived to introduce Mary Powell into a 
house where Milton often visited in St. Martin's-le-Grand. She 
was secreted in an adjoining room, on an occasion when Milton 
was known to be coming, and he was surprised by seeing her 
suddenly brought in, throw herself on her kn^es, and ask to be for- 
given. The poor young thing, now two years older and wiser, but 
still only nineteen, pleaded, truly or falsely, that her mother " had 
been all along the chief promoter of her forwardness." Milton, 
with a " noble leonine clemency " which became him, cared not for 
excuses for the past. It was enough that she was come back, and 
was willing to live with him as his wife. He received her at once, 
and not only her, but on the surrender of Oxford, in June, 1646, 
and the sequestration of Forest Hill, took in the whole family of 
Powells, including the mother-in-law, whose influence with her 
daughter might even again trouble his peace. 

It is impossible not to see that Milton had this impressive 
scene, enacted in St. Martin's-le-Grand in 1645, before his mind, 
when he wrote, twenty years afterwards, the lines in Paradise Lost, 
X. 937:— 

" Eve, with tears that ceas'd not flowing 
And tresses all disorder'd, at his feet 
Fell humble, and embracing them, besought 
His peace. . . . 

Her lowly plight 
" Immovable, till peace obtain' d from fault 
Acknowledg'd and deplor'd, in Adam wrought 
Commiseration ; soon his heart relented 
Tow'rds her, his life so late and sole delight, 
Now at his feet submissive in distress I 
Creature so fair his reconcilement seeking, 

v]i *li *!£, *lt .5!^ 

At once disarm'd, his anger all he lost." 

The garden-house in Aldersgate Street had before been found 
too small for the pupils who were being now pressed upon Milton. 
It was to a larger house in Barbican, a side street leading out of 
Aldersgate, that he brought the Powells and Mary Milton. Milton 
probably abated his exactions on the point of companionship, and 
learned to be content with her acquiesence in the duties of a wife. 
In July, 1646, she became a mother, and bore in all four children. 
Of these, three, all daughters, lived to grow up. Mary Milton her- 
self died in giving birth to the fourth child in the summer of 1652. 
She was only twenty-six, and had been married to Milton nine years. 



MILTON. 43 



CHAPTER VI. 

PAMPHLETS. 

We have now seen Milton engaged in teaching and writing on 
education, involved in domestic unhappiness, and speculating on 
the obligations of marriage. But neither of these topics formed 
the principal occupation of his mind during these years. He had 
renounced a cherished scheme of travel, because his countrymen 
were engaged at home in contending for their liberties, and it could 
not but be that the gradually intensified stages of that struggle en- 
grossed his interest, and claimed his participation. 

So imperative did he regard this claim that he allowed it to 
override the purposed dedication of his Hfe to poetry. Not indeed 
for ever and aye, but for a time. As he had renounced Greece, 
the ^gean Isles, Thebes, and the East for the fight for freedom, 
so now to the same cause he postponed the composition of his epic 
of Arthurian romance, or whatever his mind " in the spacious cir- 
cuits of her musing proposed to herself of highest hope and hard- 
est attempting." No doubt at first, in thus deferring the work of 
his life, he thought the delay would be for a brief space. He did 
not foresee that having once taken an oar, he would be chained to 
it for more than twenty years, and that he would finally owe his re- 
lease to the ruin of the cause he had served. But for the Restora- 
tion and the overthrow of the Puritans, we should never have had 
the great Puritan epic. 

The period then of his political activity is to be regarded as an 
episode in the life of the poet Milton. It is indeed an episode 
which fills twenty years, and those the most vigorous years of man- 
hood, from his thirty-second to his fifty-second year. He himself 
was conscious of the sacrifice he was making, and apologises to 
the public for thus defrauding them of the better work which he 
stood pledged to execute. As he puts it, there was no choice for 
him. He could not help himself, at this critical juncture, '' when 
the Church of God was at the foot of her insulting enemies ; " he 
would never have ceased to reproach himself, if he had refused to 
employ tlie fruits of his studies in her belialf. He saw also that a 
generation inflamed by the passions of conflict, and looking in 
breathless suspense for tlie issue of battles, was not in a mood to 
attend to poetry. Nor, indeed, was he ready to write, " not hav- 



44 MILTOI\r. 

ing yet (this is in 1642) completed to my mind the full circle of my 
private studies." 

But though he is drawn into the strife against his will, and in 
defiance of his genius, when he is in it he throws into it the whole 
vehemence of his nature. The pamphlet period, I have said, is an 
episode in the life of the poet. But it is a genuine part of Milton's 
life. However his ambition may have been set upon an epic 
crown, his zeal for what he calls the church was an equal passion, 
nay, had, in his judgment, a paramount claim upon him. He is a 
zealot among the zealots; his cause is the cause of God; and the 
sword of the Independents is the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. 
He does not refute opponents, but curses enemies. Yet his rage, 
even when most delirious, is always a Miltonic rage ; it is grand, 
sublime, terrible ! Mingled with the scurrilities of the theological 
brawl are passages of the noblest English ever written. Hartley 
Coleridge explains the dulness of the wit-combats in Shakspeare 
and Jonson, on the ground that repartee is the accomplishment 
of lighter thinkers and a less earnest age. So of 'Milton's pam- 
phlets it must be said that he was not fencing for pastime, but fight- 
ing for all he held most worthy. He had to think only of making 
his blows tell. When a battle is raging, and my friends are 
sorely pressed, am I not to help because good manners forbid the 
shedding of blood ? 

No good man can, with impunity, addict himself to party. And 
the best men will suffer most, because their conviction of the 
goodness of their cause is deeper. But when one with the sensi- 
bility of a poet throws himself into the excitements of a struggle, 
he is certain to lose his balance. The endowment of feeling and 
imagination which qualifies him to be the ideal interpreter of life, 
unfits him for participation in that real life, through the manoeuvres 
and compromises of which reason is the only guide, and where im- 
agination is as much misplaced as it would be in a game of chess. 
" The ennobling difference between one man and another is that 
one feels more than another." Milton's capacity of emotion, when 
once he became champion of a cause, could not be contained 
within the bounds of ordinary speech. It breaks into ferocious 
reprobation, into terrific blasts of vituperation, beneath which the 
very language creaks, as the timbers of a ship in a storm. Cor- 
ruptio optimi pessima. The archangel is recognisable by the en- 
ergy of his malice. Were all those accomplishments, those many 
studious years hiving wisdom, the knowledge of all the tongues, 
the command of all the thoughts of all the ages, and that wealth of 
English expression — were all these acquirements only of use, that 
their possessor might vie in defamation with an Edwards or a Du 
Moulin ? 

For it should be noted that these pamphlets, now only serving 
as a record of the prostitution of genius to political party, were, at 
the time at which they appeared, of no use to the cause in which 
they were written. Writers, with a professional tendency to mag- 
nify their office, have always been given to exaggerate the effect of 



MILTON. 4^ 

printed words. There are examples of thought having been influ- 
enced by books. But such books have been scientific, not rhetori- 
cal. Milton's pamphlets are not works of speculation, or philoso- 
phy, or learning, or solid reasoning on facts. They are inflamma- 
tory appeals, addressed to the passions of the hour. He who was 
meditating the erection of an enduring monument, such as the 
world would not willingly let die, was content to occupy himself 
with the most ephemeral of all hackwork. His own polemical writ- 
ings may be justly described in the words he himself uses of a 
book by one of his opponents, as calculated " to gain a short, con- 
temptible, and soon-fading reward, not to stir the constancy and 
solid firmness of any wise man . . . but to catch the worthless ap- 
probation of an inconstant, irrational, and image-doting rabble." 

It would have been not unnatural that the public school and 
university man, the admirer of Shakspeare and the old romances, 
the pet of Italian academies, the poet-scholar, himself the author 
of two Masks, who was nursing his wings for a new flight into the 
realms of verse, should have sided with the cavahers against the 
Puritans, with the party of culture and the humanities against the 
party which shut up the theatres and despised profane learning. 
But we have seen that there was another side to Milton's mind. 
This may be spoken of as his other self, the Puritan self, and re- 
garded as in internal conflict with the poet's self. His twenty 
years' pamphlet warfare may be presented by his biographer as 
the expression of the Puritanic Milton, who shall have been driven 
back upon his suppressed instincts as a poet by the ruin of his 
political hopes. This chart of Milton's life is at once simple and 
true. But like all physiological diagrams it falls short of the 
subtlety and complexity of human character. A study of th.e pam- 
phlets wi 1 show that the poet is all there, indeed only too openly 
for influence on opinion, and that the bhghted hope of the patriot 
lends a secret pathos to Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. 

This other element in Milton is not accurately named Puritanism. 
Even the term republicanism is a coarse and conventional de- 
scription of that sentiment which dominated his whole being, and 
which is the inspiration at once of his poetry and of his prose. To 
give a name to this sentiment, I must call it the love of liberty. It 
was an aspiration at once real and vague, after a new order of things, 
an order in which the old injustices and oppressions should cease ; 
after a new Jerusalem, a millennium, a Utopia, an Oceana. Its 
aim was to realise in political institutions that great instauration of 
which Bacon dreamed in the world of inteUigence. It was much 
more negative than affirmative, and knew better, as we all do, how 
good was hindered than how it should be promoted. " I did but 
prompt the age to quit their clogsJ'' Milton embodied, more per- '^ 
fectly than any of his cotemporaries, this spirit of the age. It is J-' 
the ardent aspiration after the pure and noble life, the aspiration '^^ 
which stamps every Hne he wrote, verse or prose, with a dignity as ■"■ 
of an heroic age. This gives consistency to all his utterances. '■ 

The doctrinaire republican of to-day cannot understand how the 



46 MILTON. 

man who approved the execution of the would-be despot Charles 
Stuart, should have been the hearty supporter of the real autocrat 
Oliver Cromwell. Milton was not the slave of a name. He cared 
not for the word republic, so as it was well with the commonwealth. 
Parliaments or single rulers, he knew, are but means to an end ; if 
that end was obtained, no matter if the constitutional guarantees 
exist or not. Many of Milton's pamphlets are certainly party plead- 
ings, choleric, one-sided, personal. But through them all runs the 
one redeeming characteristic — that they are all written on the side 
of liberty. He defended religious liberty against the prelates, civil 
liberty against the crown, the liberty of the press against the exec- 
utive, liberty of conscience against the Presbyterians, and domestic 
liberty against the tyranny of canon law. Milton's pamphlets might 
have been stamped with the motto which Selden inscribed (in Greek) 
in all his books, " Liberty before everything." 

One virtue these pamphlets possess, the virtue of style. They 
are monuments of our language so remarkable that Milton's prose 
works must always be resorted to by students, as long as EngHsh 
remains a medium of ideas. Yet even on the score of style, Milton's 
prose is subject to serious deductions. His negligence is such as 
to amount to an absence of construction. He who, in his verse, 
trained the sentence with delicate sensibility to follow his guiding 
hand into exquisite syntax, seems in hi^ prose writing to abandon 
his meaning to shift for itself. Here Milton compares disadvan- 
tageously with Hooker. Hooker's elaborate sentence, like the 
sentence of Demosthenes, is composed of parts so hinged, of 
clauses so subordinated to the main thought, that we foresee the end 
from the beginning, and close the period with a sense of perfect 
roundness and totality. Milton does not seem to have any notion 
of what a period means. He begins anywhere, and leaves off, not 
when the sense closes, but when he is out of breath. We might 
have thought this pell-mell huddle of his words was explained, if 
not excused, by the exigencies of the party pamphlet, which cannot 
wait. But the same asyntactic disorder is equally found in the 
^History of Britain^ ^\\\^\\ he had in hand for forty years. Nor 
is it only the Miltonic sentence which is incoherent ; the whole 
arrangement of his topics is equally loose, disjointed, and desultory. 
His inspiration comes from nnpulse. Had he stayed to chastise 
his emotional writing by reason and the laws of logic, he would 
have deprived himself of the sources of his strength. 

These serious faults are balanced by virtues of another kind. 
Putting Bacon aside, the condensed force and poignant brevity of 
whose aphoristic wisdom has no parallel in English, there is no 
other prosaist who possesses anything like Milton's command over 
the resources of our language. Milton cannot match the musical 
harmony and exactly balanced periods of his predecessor Hooker. 
He is without the power of varied illustration, and accumulation of 
ornamental circumstance, possessed by his contemporary, Jeremy 
Taylor (1613-1667). But neither of these great writers impress 
the reader with a sense of unlimited power such as we feel to reside 



MILTON. 4y 

in Milton. Vast as is the wealth of magnifieent words which he 
flings with both hands carelessly upon the page, we feel that there 
is still much more in reserve. 

The critics have observed {(ZoVii^x's, Poetical Decameron) ^2X 
as Milton advanced in life he gradually disused the compound 
words he had been in the habit of making for himself. However 
this may be, his words are the words of one who made a study of 
the language, as a poet studies language, searching its capacities 
for the expression of surging emotion. Jeremy Taylor's prose 
is poetical prose. Milton's prose is not poetical prose, but a 
different thing, the prose of a poet; not like Taylor's, loaded 
with imagery on tlie outside ; but coloured by imagination from 
within. Milton is the first English writer who, possessing in 
the ancient models a standard of the effect which could be 
produced by a choice of words, set himself to the conscious 
study of our native tongue with a firm faith in its as yet 
undeveloped powers as an instrument of thought. 

The words in Milton's poems have been counted, and it appears 
that he employs 8000, while Shakspeare's plays and poems yield 
about 15,000. From this it might be inferred that the Miltonic 
vocabulary is only half as rich as that of Shakspeare. But no 
inference can be founded upon the absolute number of words used 
by any writer. We must know, not the total of different words, 
but i\\Q p7'oportion of different words to the whole of any writer's 
words. Now to furnish a list of 100 different words the Enghsh 
Bible requires 531 common words, Shakspeare 164, Milton 135 only. 
This computation is founded on the poems; it would be curious to 
have the same test tried upon the prose writings, though no such 
test can be as trustworthy as the educated ear of a hstener to a 
continued reading. 

It is no part of a succinct biography, such as the present, to 
furnish an account in detail of the various controversies of the time, 
as Milton engaged in them. The reader will doubtless be content 
with the bare indication of the subjects on which he wrote. The 
whole number of Milton's political pamphlets is twenty-five. Of 
these, twenty-one are written in English, and four in Latin. Of the 
Tractate of Education and the four divorce pamphlets something 
has been already said. Of the remaining twenty, nine, or nearly 
half, relate to church government, or ecclesiastical affairs ; eight 
treat of the various crises of the civil strife; and two are personal 
vindications of himself against one of his antagonists. There re- 
mains one tract of which the subject is of a more general and per- 
manent nature, the best known of all the series, Areopagitica : A 
Speech for the Liberty of unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of 
England. The whole series of twenty-five extends over a period 
of somewhat less than twenty years ; the earliest, viz., Of Reforma- 
tion touching Church Discipline in England, and the Causes that 
hitherto have hindered it, having been published in 1641 ; the latest, 
entitled, A ready and easy way to establish a free Commonwealth, 
coming out in March, 1660, after the torrent of royalism had set in, 



48 MILTON'. 

whicli was to sweep away the men and the cause to which Milton 
had devoted himself. Milton's pen thus accompanied the whole of 
the Puritan revolution from the modest constitutional opposition in 
which it commenced, through its unexpected triumph, to its crush- 
ing overthrow by the royalist and clerical reaction. 

The autumn of 1641 brought with it a sensible lull in the storm 
of revolutionary passion. Indeed, there began to appear all the 
symptoms of a reaction, and of the formation of a solid conserva- 
tive party, likely to be strong enough to check, or even to suppress, 
the movement. The impulse seemed to have spent itself, and a 
desire for rest from political agitation began to steal over the na- 
tion. Autumn and the harvest turn men's thoughts towards coun- 
try occupations and sports. The King went off to Scotland in 
August; the Houses adjourned till the 20th October. The Scot- 
tish army was paid off, and had repassed the border; the Scot- 
tish commissioners and preachers had left London. 

It was a critical moment for the Puritan party. Some very 
considerable triumphs they had gained. The arch-enemy Strafford 
had been brought to the block; Laud was in the tower; the leading 
members of Convocation, bisliops, deans, and archdeacons, had 
been heavily fined ; the Star Chamber and the High Commission 
Court had been abolished ; the Stannary and Forestal jurisdictions 
restrained. But the Puritan movement aimed at far more than 
this. It was not only that the root-and-branch men were pushing 
for a generally more levelling policy, but the whole Puritan party 
were committed to a struggle with the hierarchy of the Established 
Church. It was not so much that they demanded more and more 
reform, with the growing appetite of revolution, but that as long as 
bishops existed, nothing that had been wrested from them was 
secure. The Puritans could not exist in safety side by side with a 
church whose principle was that there was no church without the 
apostolic succession. The abolition of episcopacy and the substi- 
tution of the Presbyterian platform was, so it then seemed, a bare 
measure of necessary precaution, and not the urgency of dissatisfied 
spirits. Add to this, that it was well understood by those who 
were near enough to the principal actors in the drama, that the 
concessions which had been made by the Court had been easily 
made, because they could be taken back, when the time should 
come, with equal ease. Even the most moderate men, who were 
satisfied with the amount of reform already obtained, must have 
trembled at its insecurity. The Puritan leatlers must have viewed 
with dismay the tendency in the nation towards a reaction in fa- 
vour of things as they were. 

It was upon this condition of the public mind that Milton per- 
sistently poured pamphlet after pam])hlet, successive vials of 
apocalyptic wrath. He exhausts all the resources of rhetoric, and 
plays upon every note in the gamut of public feeling, that he may 
rouse the apathetic, confirm the wavering, dumfound the malignant ; 
where there was zeal, to fun it into fiame ; where there was opposi* 



MILTON. 49 

tion, to cow and browbeat it by indignant scorn and terrific denun- 
ciation. The first of these manifestoes was (i) Of Rcfonnation 
touching CJuircJi Discipline^ of which I have already spoken. This 
was immediately followed by (2) Of P?-elaticall Episcopacy. This 
tract was a reply, in form, to a publication of Archbishop Usher. 
It was about the end of May, 1641, that Usher had come forward 
on the breach with his Judgment of Dr. Rain olds touching the 
Original of Episcopacy. Rainolds, who had been President of 
Corpus (1598-1607), had belonged to the Puritan party in his day, 
had refused a bishopric, and was known, like Usher himself, to be 
little favourable to the exclusive claims of the high prelatists. He 
was thus an unexceptionable witness to adduce in favour of the 
apostolic origin of the distinction between bishop and presbyter. 
Usher, in editing Rainolds' opinions, had backed them up with all 
the additional citations which his vast reading could supply. 

Milton could not speak with the weight that attached to Usher, 
the most learned Churchman of the age, who had spent eighteen 
years in going through a complete course of fathers and councils. 
But, in the first paragraph of his answer, Milton adroitly puts the 
controversy upon a footing by which antiquarian research is put 
out of court. Episcopacy is either of human or divine origin. If 
of human origin, it may be either retained or abolished, as may be 
found expedient. If of divine appointment, it must be proved to 
be so out of Scripture. If this cannot be proved out of inspired 
Scripture, no accumulation of merely human assertion of the point 
can be of the least authority. Having thus shut out antiquity as 
evidence in the case, he proceeds nevertheless to examine his oppo- 
nent's authorties, and sets them aside by a style of argument which 
has more of banter than of criticism. 

One incident of this collision between Milton, young and un- 
known, and the venerable prelate, whom he was assaulting with 
the rude wantonness of untempered youth, deserves to be mentioned 
here. Usher had incautiously included the Ignatian epistles among 
his authorities. This laid the most learned man of the day at the 
mercy of an adversary of less reading than himself. Milton, who 
at least knew so much suspicion of the genuineness of these re- 
mains as Casaubon's Exercitations on Baronius and Vedelin's 
edition (Geneva, 1623) could tell him, pounced upon this critical 
flaw, and delightedly denounced in trenchant tone this " Perkin 
Warbeck of Ignatius," and the " supposititious offspring of some 
dozen epistles." This rude shock it was which set Usher upon a 
more careful examination of the Ignatian question. The result was 
his well-known edition of Ignatius, printed 1642, though not pub- 
lished till 1644, in which he acknowledged the total spuriousness 
of nine epistles, and the partial interpolation of the other six. I 
have not noticed in Usher's Pi^olegovicna that he alludes to Milton's 
onslaught. Nor, indeed, was he called upon to do so in a scientific 
investigation, as Milton had brought no contribution to the solu- 
tion of the question beyond sound and fury. 

Of Milton's third pamphlet, entitled (3) Animadversions on the 

4 



5° 



MILTON. 



Remonstrants^ defence against Sinectyinmius, it need only be said 
that it is a violent personal onfall upon Joseph Hall, bishop, first, 
of Exeter and afterwards of Norwich. The bishop, by descending 
into the arena of controversy, had deprived himself of the privilege 
which his literary eminence should have secured to hirn. But 
nothing can excuse or reconcile us to the indecent scurrility with 
which he is assailed in Milton's pages, which reflect more discredit 
on him who wrote them, than on him against whom they are 
written. 

The fifth pamphlet, called (5) An Apology against a Pamphlet 
called'' A Modest Confutation, &^cy (1642), is chiefly remarkable 
for a defence of his own Cambridge career. A man who throws 
dirt, as Milton did, must not be surprised if some of it comes back 
to him. A son of Bishop Hall, coming forward as his father's 
champion and avenger, had raked up a garbled version of Milton's 
quarrel with his tutor Chappell (see'p. 10), and by a further distor- 
tion had brought it out in the shape that, " after an inordinate and 
violent youth spent at the university," Milton had been '• vomited 
out thence." From the university this "alchemist of slander" 
follows him to the city, and declares that where Milton's morning 
haunts are, he wisses not, but that his afternoons are spent in play- 
houses and bordelloes. Milton replies to these random charges 
by a lengthy account of himself and his studious habits. As the 
reader may expect a specimen of Milton's prose style, T quote a 
part of this autobiographical paragraph : — • 

*' I had my time, as others have who have good learning bestowed upon 
them, to be sent to those places where the opinion was it might be sooner 
attained; and, as the manner is, was not unstudied in those authors which 
are most commended, whereof some were grave orators and historians, 
whom methought I loved indeed, but as my age then was, so I understood 
them; others were the smooth elegiac poets, whereof the schools are not 
scarce ; whom both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing, 
which in imitation I found most easy, and most agreeable to nature's part 
in me, and for their matter, which what it is there be few who know not, 
I was so alloweci to read, that no recreation came to me better welcome. 
.... Whence having observed them to account it the chief glory of their 
wit, in that they were ablest to judge, to praise, and by Lhat could esteem 
themselves worthiest to love those high perfections which under one or 
other name they took to celebrate, I thought with myself by every instinct 
and presage of nature which is not wont to be false, that what emboldened 
them to this task might with such diligence as they used embolden me, 
and that what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share, would herein best 
appear and best value itself by how much more wisely and with more love 
of virtue I should choose (let rude ears be absent) the object of not unlike 

praises Nor blame it in those years to propose to themselves such 

a reward as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life have 
sometimes preferred. Whereof not to be sensible when good and fair in 
one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and withal an 
ungentle and swainish breast. For by the firm settling of these persua- 
sions I became so much a proficient, that if I found those authors any- 
where speaking unworthy things of themselves, or unchaste of those names 
which before they had extolled, this effect it wrought with me, from that 



MILTON. -I 

time forward their art I still applauded, but the men I deplored ; and 
above them all preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, 
who never write but honour of them to whom they devote their verse', 
displaying sublime and pure thoughts without transgression. And long it 
was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he, who would 
not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, 
ought himself to be a true poem, that is a composition and pattern of the 
best and honourablest things, not presumin^^ to sing high praises of heroic 
men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the 
practice of all that which is praiseworthy. 

" These reasonings together with a certain niceness of nature, an hon- 
esthaughtiness and self-esteem, either of what I was or what I might be, 
which let envy call pride, and lastly that modesty, whereof, though not in 
the title-page, yet here, I may be excused to make some beseeming pro- 
fession, all these uniting the supply of their natural aid together, kept me 
still above those low descents of mind, beneath which he must deject and 
plunge himself, that can agree to saleable and unlawful prostitutions. 

" Next, for hear me out now, readers, that I may tell ye whither my 
younger feet wandered, I betook me among those lofty fables and -ro- 
mances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded 
by our victorious kings, and from hence had in renown over all Christen- 
dom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he should defend 
to the expence of his best blood, or of his life if it so befel him, the honour 
and chastity of virgin or matron. From whence even then I learnt what 
a noble virtue chastity ever must be, to the defence of which so many 
worthies by such a dear adventure of themselves had sworn. And if I 
found in the story afterwards any of them by word or deed breaking that 
oath, I judged it the same fault of the poet as that which is attributed to 
Homer to have written undecent things of the gods. Only this my mind 
gave me, that every free and gentle spirit without that oath ought to be 
borne a knight, nor needed to expect the gilt spur, or the laying of a sword 
upon his shoulder, to stir him up both by his counsel and his arm to serve 
and protect the weakness of any attempted chastity. So that even those 
books which to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose 
living, I cannot think how unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so 
many incitements to the love and steadfast observation of virtue." 

This is one of the autobiographical oases in these pamphlets, 
which are otherwise arid deserts of sand, scorched by the fire of 
extinct passion, It may be asked w^hy it is that a few men, Gi-bbon 
or Milton, are indulged without challenge in talk about themselves, 
which would be childish vanity or odious egotism in others. When 
a Frenchman writes, '-'• Nous avons tons, nous autres Frangais, des 
seduisantes qualites " (Gaffarel), he is ridiculous. The difference 
is not merely that we tolerate in a man of confessed superiority 
what would be intolerable in an equal. This is true ; but there is 
a further distinction of moral quality in men's confessions. In 
Milton, as in Gibbon, the gratification of self-love, which attends 
all autobiography, is felt to be subordinated to a nobler intention. 
The lofty conception which Milton formed of his vocation as a 
poet, expands his soul and absorbs his personality. It is his 
office, and not himself, which he magnifies. The details of his 
life and nurture are important, not because they belong to him, 



-2 MILTON. 

but because he belongs, by dedication, to a high and sacred calling. 
He is extremely jealous, not of his own reputation, but of the 
credit which is due to lofty endeavour. We have only to compare 
Milton's magnanimous assumption of the first place with the paltry 
conceit with which, in the following age of Dryden and Pope, men 
spoke of themselves as authors, to see the wide difference between 
the professional vanity of successful authorship and the proud con- 
sciousness of a prophetic mission. Milton leads a dedicated hfe, 
and has laid down for himself the law that " he who would not be 
frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, 
ou^ht himself to be a true poem." 

^If Milton had not been the author of Lycidas and Paradise Lost, 
his political pamphlets would have been as forgotten as are the 
thousand civil war tracts preserved in the Thomason collection in 
the Museum, or have served, at most, as philological landmarks. 
One, however, of his prose tracts has continued to enjoy some de- 
gree of credit down to the present time, for its matter as well as 
for its words, Areopagitica. This tract belongs to the year 1644, 
the most fertile year in Milton's life, as in it he brought out two 
of his divorce tracts, the Tractate of Education cind the Areopa- 
gitica. As Milton's moving principle \vas not any preconceived 
system of doctrine, but the passion for liberty in general, it was 
natural that he should plead, when occasion called, for liberty of 
the press, among others. The occasion was one personal to 
himself. 

It is well known that, early in the history of printing, govern- 
ments became jealous of this new instrument for influencing 
opinion. In England, in 1556, under Mary, the Stationers' Com- 
pany was invested with legal privileges, having the twofold object 
of protecting the book trade and controlling writers. All publica- 
tions were required to be registered in the register of the company. 
No persons could set up a press without a Hcense, or print any- 
thing which had not been previously approved by some official 
censor. The court which had come to be known as the court of 
Star Chamber exercised criminal jurisdiction over offenders, and 
even issued its own decrees for the regulation of printing. The 
arbitrary action of this court had no small share in bringing about 
the resistance to Charles I. But the fall of the royal authority did 
not mean the emancipation of the press. The Parhament had no in- 
tention of letting go the control which the monarchy had exercised ; 
the incidence of the coercion was to be shifted from themselves 
upon their opponents. The Star Chamber was abolished, but its 
powers of search and seizure were transferred to the Company of 
Stationers. Licensing was to go on as before, but to be exercised 
by special commissioners, instead of by the Archbishop and the 
Bishop of London. Only whereas, before, contraband had con- 
sisted of Presbyterian books, henceforward it was Catholic and 
Anglican books which would be suppressed. 

"Such was not Milton's idea of the liberty of thought and speech 
in a free commonwealth. He had himself written for the Presby- 



MILTOiV. 



53 



terians four unlicensed pamphlets. It was now open to him to 
write any number, and to get them licensed, provided they were 
written on the same side. This was not liberty, as he had learned 
it in his classics, " ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere 
Jicet." Over and above this encroachment on the liberty of the 
free citizen, it so happened that at this moment Milton himself was 
concerned to ventilate an opinion which was not Presbyterian, and 
had no chance of passing a Presbyterian licenser. His Doctrine 
and Discipline of Divojxe was just ready for press when the ordin- 
ance of 1643 came into operation. He published it without license 
and without printer's name, in defiance of the law, and awaited 
the consequences. There were no consequences. He repeated 
the offence in a second edition in February, 1644, putting his 
name now (the first edition had been anonymous), and dedi- 
cating it to the very Parliament whose ordinance he was set- 
ting at nought. This tiine the Commons, stirred up by a peti- 
tion from the Company of Stationers, referred the matter to 
the committee of printing. It went no further. Either it was 
deemed inexpedient to molest so sound a Parliamentarian as 
Milton, or Cromwell's " accommodation resolution " of September 
13, 1644, opened the eyes of the Presbyterian zealots to the exist- 
ence in the kingdom of a new, and much wider, phase of opinion, 
which ominously threatened the compact little edifice of Presby- 
terian truth that they had been erecting with a profound conviction 
of its exclusive orthodoxy. 

The occurrence had been sufficient to give a new direction to 
Milton's thoughts. Regardless of the fact that his plea for liberty 
in marriage had fallen upon deaf ears, he would plead for liberty 
of speech. The Areopagitica^ for the Liberty of iuilice7ised Print- 
ing, came out in November, 1644, an unlicensed, unregistered 
publication, without printer's or bookseller's name. It was cast in 
the form of a speech addressed to the Parliament. The motto 
was taken from Euripides, and printed in the original Greek, which 
was not, when addressed to the Parliament of 1644, the absurdity 
which it would be now. The title is less appropriate, being bor- 
rowed from the Areopagitic Discourse oi Isocrates, between which 
and Milton's Speech there is no resemblance either in subject or 
style. All that the two productions have in common is their form. 
They are both unspoken orations, written to the address of a rep- 
resentative assembly — to the Boule or Senate of Athens, and to 
the Parliament of England. 

Milton's Speech is in his own best style ; a copious flood of 
majestic eloquence, the outpouring of a noble soul with a divine 
scorn of narrow dogma and paltry aims. But it is a mere pamphlet 
extemporis^^d in, at most, a month or two, without research or 
special knowledge, with no attempt to ascertain general principles, 
and more than Milton's usual disregard of method. A jurist's 
question is here handled by a rhetorician. He has preached a 
noble and heart-stirring sermon on his text, but the problem for 
the legislator remains where it was. The vagueness and confusion 



^4 MILTON. 

of the thoughts finds a vehicle in language which is too often over- 
crowded and obscure. I think the Areopagitica has few or no 
offences against taste ; on the other hand, it has few or none of those 
grand passages which redeem the scurrilit)^ of his political pam- 
phlets. The passage in which Milton's visit to Galileo "grown old, 
a prisoner to the Inquisition," is mentioned, is often quoted for its 
biographical interest ; and the terse dictum, " as good almost kill 
a man as kill a good book," has passed into a current axiom. A 
paragraph at the close, where he hints that the time may be come 
to suppress the suppressors, intimates, but so obscurely as to be 
likely to escape notice, that Milton had already made up his mind 
that a struggle with the Presbyterian party was to be the sequel of 
the overthrow of the Royalists. He has not yet arrived at the point 
he will hereafter reach, of rejecting the very idea of a minister of 
religion, but he is already aggrieved by the implicit faith which the 
Puritan laity, who had cast out bishops, were beginning to bestow 
upon their pastor — " a factor to whose care and credit he may com- 
mit the whole managing of his religious affairs." Finally, it must 
be noted that Milton, though he had come to see round Presbyterian- 
itm, had not, in 1644, shaken off all dogmatic profession. His 
soleration of opinion was far from complete. He would call in the 
intervention of the executioner in the case of "mischievous and 
libellous books," and could not bring himself to contemplate the 
toleration of Popery and open superstition, " which as it extirpates 
all rehgious and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate ; 
provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used 
to win and gain the weak and misled." 

The Arcopagitica, as might be expected, produced no effect 
upon the legislation of the Long Parliament, of whom (savs Hallam) 
"very few acts of political wisdom or courage are recorded." In- 
dividual licensers became more lax in the performance of the duty, 
but this is reasonably to be ascribed to the growing spirit of inde- 
pendency— a spirit which was incompatible wnth any embargo on 
the utterance of private opinion. A curious ej^ilogue to the history 
of this publication is the fact, first brought to light by Mr. Masson, 
that the author of the Areopas^itica, at a later time,^ acted himself 
in the capacity of licenser. It was in 1651, under the Common- 
wealth, Marchmont Needham being editor of the weeklv paper 
called Mercnrius Politicus, that Milton was associated with him 
as his censor or supervising editor. Mr. Masson conjectures, with 
some probability, that the leading articles of the Mcrciirins, dur- 
ing part of the year 1651, received touches from Milton's hand. 
But this was. after all, rather in the character of editor, whose 
business it is to see that nothing improper goes into the paper, than 
in that of press licenser in the se'^^e in which the Areopagitica had 
denounced it. 



MIL TO A'. 



55 



CHAPTER VII. 

BIOGRAPHICAL. 1640 — 1 649. 

In September, 1645, Milton left the garden-house in Aldersgate 
for a larger house in Barbican, in the same neighbourhood, but a 
little further from the city gate, i. e. more in the country. The 
larger house was, perhaps, required for the accommodation of his 
pupils (see above, p. 31), but it served to shelter his wife's family, 
when they were thiown upon the world In- Ihe surrender of Oxford 
in June, 1646. In this Barbican house Mr. Powell died at the end 
of that year. Milton had been promised with his wife a portion of 
1000/.; but Mr. Powell's affairs had long been in a very embar- 
rassed condition, and now by the consequences of delinquency that 
condition had become one of absolute ruin. Great pains have been 
bestowed by Mr. Masson in unraveUing the entanglement of the 
Powell accounts. The data which remain are ample, and we can- 
not but feel astonished at the accuracy with which our national 
records, in more important matters so defective, enable us to set 
out a debtor and creditor balance of the estate of a private citizen 
who died more than 200 year asgo. But the circumstances are 
peculiarly intricate, and we are still unable to reconcile Mr. Pow- 
ell's will with the composition records, both of which are extant. 
As a compounding delinquent, his fine, assessed at the customary 
rate of two years' income, was fixed by the commissioners at 180/. 
The commissioners must have, therefore, been satisfied that his 
income did not exceed 90/. a year. Yet by his will of date De- 
cember 30, 1646, he leaves his estate of Forest Hill, the annual 
value of which alone far exceeded 90/., to his eldest son. This 
property is not mentioned in the inventory of his estate, real and 
personal, laid before the commissioners, sworn to by the delinquent, 
and by them accepted. The possible explanation is that the Forest 
Hill property had really passed into the possession, by foreclosure, 
of the mortgagee. Sir Robert Pye, who sat for Woodstock in the 
Long Parliament, but that Mr. Powell, making his will on his death- 
bed, pleased himself with the fancy of leaving his son and heir an 
estate which was no longer his to dispose of. Putting Forest Hill 
out of the account, it would appear that the sequestrators had 
dealt somewhat harshly with Mr. Powell, for they had included in 
their estate one doubtful asset of 500/., and one non-existent of 



56 



MILTON. 



400/. This last item was a stock of timber stated to be at Forest 
Hill, but which had really been appropriated without payment by 
the Parliamentarians, and part of it voted by Parliament itself 
towards repair of the church in the staunch Puritan town of Ban- 
bury. 

The upshot of the whole transaction is that, in satisfaction of 
his claim of 1500/. (1000/. his wife's dower, 500/. an old loan of 
1627), Milton came into possession of some property at Wheatley. 
This property, consisting of the tithes of Wheatley, certain cot- 
tages, and three and a half yards of land, had in the time of the 
disturbances produced only 40/. a year. But as the value of all 
property improved when the civil war came to an end, Milton 
found the whole could now be let for 80/. But then out of this 
he had to pay Mr. Powell's composition, reduced to 130/. on 
Milton's petition, and the widow's jointure, computed at 26/. 13^. 
4^^. per annum . What of income remained after these disburse- 
ments he might apply towards repaying himself the old loan of 
1627. This was all Milton ever saw of the 1000/. which Mr. 
Powell, with the high-flying magnificence of a cavalier who knew 
he was ruined, had promised as his daughter's portion. 

Mr. Powell's death was followed in less than three months by 
that of John Milton, senior. He died in the house in Barbican, 
and the entry, "John Milton, gentleman, 15 (March)," among the 
burials in March, 1646, is still to be seen in the register of the 
parish of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. A host of eminent men have 
traced the first impulse of their genius to their mother. Milton 
always acknowledged with just gratitude that it was to his father's 
discerning taste and fostering care that he owed the encourage- 
ment of his studies, and the leisure which rendered them possible. 
He has registered this gratitude in both prose and verse. The 
Latin hexameters, " Ad patrem," written at Horton, are inspired 
by a feeling far beyond commonplace filial piety, and a warmth 
which is rare indeed in neo-Latin versification. And when, in his 
prose pamphlets, he has occasion to speak of himself, he does not 
omit the acknowledgment of " the ceaseless dihgence and care of 
my father, whom God recompense." {Reason of Church Govern- 
ment). 

After the death of his father, being now more at ease in his 
circumstances, he gave up taking pupils, and quitted the large 
house in Barbican for a smaller "in High Holborn, opening back- 
wards into Lincoln's Inn Fields. This removal was about Michael- 
mas, 1647. 

During this period, 1639-1649, while his interests were engaged 
by the all-absorbing events of the civil strife, he wrote no poetry, 
or none deserving the name. All artists have intervals of non- 
productiveness, usually caused by exhaustion. This was not 
Milton's case. His genius was not his master, nor could it pass, 
like that of Leonardo de Vinci, unmoved through the most tragic 
scenes. He deliberately suspended it at the call of what he be- 
lieved to be duty to his country. His unrivalled power of expres- 



MILTON. ^y 

sion was placed at the service of a passionate political conviction. 
This prostitution of faculty avenged itself ; for when he did turn 
to poetry, his strength was gone from him. The period is chiefly 
marked by sonnets, not many, one in a year, or thereabouts. That 
Ou the religious ineinoiy of Mrs. Catherine Tho?nson, in 1646, 
is the lowest point touched by Milton in poetry, for his metrical 
psalms do not deserve the name. 

The sonnet, or Elegy on Mrs. Catherine Thomson in the form 
of a sonnet, though in poetical merit not distinguishable from the 
average rehgious verse of the Caroline age, has an interest for the 
biographer. It breathes a holy calm that is in sharp contrast with 
the angry virulence of the pamphlets, which were being written at 
this very time by the same pen. Amid his intemperate denuncia- 
tions of his political and ecclesiastical foes, it seems that Milton 
did not inwardly forfeit the peace which passeth all understanding. 
He had formerly said himself {Doctrine and Disc), " nothing more 
than disturbance of mind suspends us from approaching to God." 
Now, out of all the clamour and the bitterness of the battle of the 
sects, he can retire and be alone with his heavenly aspirations, 
which have lost none of their ardour by having laid aside all their 
sectarianism. His genius has forsaken him, but his soul still glows 
with the fervour of devotion. 

The sonnet (xv.) On the Lord-General Fairfax at the siege of 
Colchester, written in 1648, is again a manifesto of the writer's 
political feelings, nobly uttered, and investing party with a patriotic 
dignity not unworthy of the man, Milton. It is a hortatory lyric, a 
trumpet-call to his party in the moment of victory to remember the 
duties which that victory imposed upon them. It is not without 
the splendid resonance of the Italian canzone. But it can scarcely 
be called poetr}', expressing, as it does, facts directly, and not in- 
directly through their imaginative equivalents. Fairfax was. doubt- 
less, well worthy that Milton should have commemorated him in a 
higher strain. Of Fairfax's eminent qualities the sonnet only 
dwells on two, his personal valour, which had been tried in many 
fights — he had been three times dangerously Vv^ounded in the York- 
shire campaign — and his superiority to sordid interests. Of his gen- 
eralship, in which he was second to Cromwell only, and of his love 
of arts and learning, nothing is said, though the last was the passion 
of his life, for which at forty he renounced ambition. Perhaps in 
1648 Milton, who lived a very retired hfe, did not know of these 
tates, and had not heard that it was by Fairfax's care that the 
Bodleian library was saved from wreck on the surrender of Oxford 
in 1646. And it was not till later, years after the sonnet was 
written, that the same Fairfax, " whose name in arms through Eu- 
rope rings," became a competitor of Milton in the attempt to para- 
phrase the Psalms in metre. 

Milton's paraphrase of the Psalms belongs to history, but to the 
history of psalmody, not that of poetry. At St. Paul's School, at 
fifteen, the boy had turned two psalms, the 114th and the 136th, by 
way of exercise. That in his day of plenary inspiration, Milton, 



g8 MILTON. 

who disdained Dryden as " a rhymist but no poet," and has re* 
corded his own impatience with the " drawhng versifiers," should 
have undertaken to grind down the noble antistrophic lyrics of the 
Hebrew bard into ballad rhymes for the use of Puritan worship, 
would have been impossible. But the idea of being useful to his 
country had acquired exclusive possession of his mind. Even' his 
faculty of verse should be employed in the good cause. If Parlia- 
ment had set him the task, doubtless he would have willingly un- 
dertaken it, as Corneille, in the blindness of Catholic obedience, 
versified the Lnitatio ChristiTii the command of the Jesuits. Mil- 
ton was not officially employed, but voluntarily took up the work. 
The Puritans were bent upon substituting a new version of the 
Davidic Psalms for that of Sternhold and Hopkins, for no other 
reason than that the latter formed part of the hated Book of Com- 
mon Prayer. The Commons had pronounced in favor of a version 
by one of their own members, the staunch Puritan M. P. for Truro, 
Francis Rouse. The Lords favoured a rival book, and numerous 
other claimants were before the public. Dissatisfied with any of 
these attempts, Milton would essay himself. In 1648 he turned 
nine psalms, and recurring to the task in 1653, ''did into verse" 
eight more. He thought these specimens worth preserving, and 
annexing to the volume of his poems which he published himself 
in 1673. As this doggerel continues to encumber each succeeding 
edition of the Poetical Works, it is as well that Milton did not 
persevere with his experiment and produce a complete Psalter. 
He prudently abandoned a task in which success is impossible. A 
metrical psalm, being a compromise between the psalm and the 
hymn, like other compromises, misses, rather than combines, the 
distinctive excellences of the things united. That Milton should 
ever have attempted what poetry forbids, is only another proof how 
entirely at this period more absorbing motives had possession of 
his mind and overbore his poetical judgment. It is a coincidence 
worth remembering that Milton's cotemporary, Lord Clarendon, 
was at this very time solacing his exile at Madrid by composing, 
not a version, but a commentary upon the Psalms, " applying those 
devotions to the troubles of this time." 

Yet all the while that he was thus unfaithful in practice to his 
art, it was poetry that possessed his real affections, and the reputa- 
tion of a poet which formed his ambition. It was a temporary sep- 
aration, and not a divorce which he designed. In each successive 
pamphlet he reiterates his undertaking to redeem his pledge of a 
great work, as soon as liberty shall be consolidated in the realm. 
Meanwhile, as an earnest of what should be hereafter, he permitted 
the publication of a collection of his early poems. 

This little volume of some 200 pages, rude in execution as it is, 
ranks among the highest prizes of the book collector, very few 
copies being extant, and those mostly in public libraries. It ap- 
peared in 1645, ai'^cl owed its appearance, not to the vanity of the 
author, but to the zeal of a publisher. Humphrey Moseley, at the 
sign of the Prince's Arms, in St. Paul's Churchyard, suggested the 



MILTON, 59 

collection to Milton, and undertook the risk of it, though knowing, 
as he says in the prefixed address of The Stationer to the Reader, 
that " the slightest pamphlet is nowadays more vendible than the 
works of learnedest men." It may create some surprise that, in 
1645, there should have been any public in England for a volume 
of verse. Naseby had been fought in June, Philiphaugh in Septem- 
ber, Fairfax and Cromwell were continuing their victorious career 
in the west, and the King was reduced to the single stronghold of 
Oxford. It w^as clear that the conflict was decided in favour of the 
Parliament, but men's minds must have been strung to a pitch of 
intense expectation as to what kind of settlement was to come. 
Yet, at the very crisis of the civil strife we find a London pubHsher 
able to bring out the Poems of Waller (1644), and sufficiently en- 
couraged by their reception to follow them up, in the next year, 
with the Poems of Mr. John Milton. Are we warranted in infer- 
ring that a finer public was beginning to loathe the dreary theo- 
logical polemic of which it had had a surfeit, and turned to a book 
of poetry as that which was most unlike the daily garbage, just as 
a latter public absorbed five thousand copies of Scott's Lay of the 
Last Minstrel in the year of Austerlitz ? One would like to know 
who were the purchasers of Milton and Waller, when the cavalier 
famiHes were being ruined by confiscations and compositions, and 
Puritan families would turn with pious horror from the very name 
of a Mask. 

Milton was himself editor of his own volume, and prefixed to 
it, again out of Virgil's Eclogues, the characteristic motto, " Bac- 
care f rontem Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua /«/2^r^," indicating 
that his poetry was all to come. 



6o MILTON. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP. 

The Crown having fallen on January 30, 1649, ^"^^ ^^ House 
of Lords by the vote of February 6 following, the sovereign power 
in England was for the moment in the hands of that fragment of 
the Long Parliament which remained after the various purges and 
expulsions to which it had been subjected. Some of the excluded 
members were allowed to return, and by occasional new elections 
in safe boroughs the number of members was raised to one hun- 
dred and fifty, securing an average attendance of about seventy. 
The future government of the nation was declared to be by way 
of a republic, and the writs ran in the name of the Keepers of the 
Liberty of England, by authority of Parliament. But the real 
centre of power was the Council of State, a body of forty-one 
members, nominated for a period of twelve months, according to a 
plan of constitution devised by the army leaders. In the hands of 
this republican Council was concentrated a combination of power 
such as had never been wielded by any English monarch. But, 
though its attribution of authority was great, its exercise of the 
powers lodged with it was hampered by differences among its mem- 
bers, and the disaffection of various interests and parties. The 
Council of State co-ntained most of the notable statesmen of the 
Parliamentary party, and had before it a vast task in reorganising 
the administration of England, in the conduct of an actual war in 
Ireland, a possible war in Scotland, and in the maintenance of the 
honour of the republic in its relations with foreign princes. 

The Council of State prepared the business for its considera- 
tion through special committees for special departments of the 
public service. The Committee for Foreign Affairs consisted of 
Whitelocke, Vane, Lord Lisle, Lord Denbigh, Mr. Marten, Mr. 
Lisle. A secretary was required to translate despatches, both 
those which were sent out and those which were received. Noth- 
ing seems more natural than that the author of the Tenure of Kings 
and Magistrates^ who was at once a staunch Parliamentarian, an 
accomplished Latin scholar, and conversant with more than one of 
the spoken languages of the Continent, should be thought of for 
the office. Yet so little was Milton personally known, living as he 
did the life of a retired student, that it was the accident of his hav- 
ing the acquaintance of one of the new Council to which he owed 
the appointment. 



MILTON. 5, 

The post was offered him, but would he accept it ? He had 
never ceased to revolve in his mind subjects capable of poetical 
treatment, and to cherish his own vocation as the classical poet of 
the English language. Peace had come, and leisure was within 
his reach. He was poor, but his wants were simple, and he had 
enough wherewith to meet them. Already in 1649 unmistakable 
symptoms threatened his sight, and warned him of the necessity 
of the most rigid economy in the use of his eyes. The duties 
that he was now asked to undertake were indefinite already in 
amount, and would doubtless extend themselves if zealously dis- 
charged. 

But the temptation was strong, and he did not resist it. The 
increase of income was, doubtless, to Milton the smallest among 
the inducements now offered him. He had thought it sufficient 
and an honourable employment to serve his country with his pen 
as a volunteer. Here was an offer to become her official, author- 
ised servant, and to bear a part, though a humble part, in the great 
work of reorganisation which was now to be attempted. Above 
all other allurements to a retired student, unversed in men, and 
ready to idealise character, was the opportunity of becoming at once 
personally acquainted with all the great men of the patriotic party, 
whom his ardent imagination had invested with heroic qualities. 
The very names of Fairfax, Vane, and Cromwell, called up in him 
emotions for which prose was an inadequate vehicle. Nor was it 
only that in the Council itself he would be in daily intercourse with 
such men as Henry Marten, Hutchinson, Whitelocke, Harrington, 
St. John, Ludlow, but his position would introduce him at once to 
all the members of the House who were worth knowing. It was 
not merely a new world ; it was the world which was here opened 
for the first time to Milton. And we must remember that all 
scholar as he was, Milton was well convinced of the truth that 
there are other sources of knowledge besides books. He had 
himself spent " many studious and contemplative years in the 
search of rehgious and civil knowledge," yet he knew that, for a 
mind large enough to " take in a general survey of humane things," 
it was necessary to know — 

" The world, .... her glory, 
Empires and monarchs, and their radiant courts, 
Best school of best experience." 

He had repeatedly, as if excusing his political interludes, renewed 
his pledge to devote all his powers to poetry as soon as they should 
be fully ripe. To complete his education as a poet, he wanted 
initiation into affairs. Here was an opening far beyond any he had 
ever dreamed of. The sacrifice of time and precious eyesight 
which he was to make was cosdy, but it was not pure waste ; it 
would be partly returned to him in a ripened experience in this 

" Insight 
In all things that to greatest actions lead." 



6a MILTON, 

He accepted the post at once without hesitation. On March 
13, 1649, the Committee for P'oreign Affairs was directed to make 
the offer to him ; on March 15 he attended at Whitehall to be ad- 
mitted to office. Well would it have been both for his genius and 
his fame if he had declined it. His genius might have reverted to 
its proper course, while he was in the flower of age, with eyesight 
still available, and a spirit exalted by the triumph of the good 
cause. His fame would have been saved from the degrading in- 
cidents of the contention with Salmasius and Morus, and from 
being tarnished by the obloquy of the faction which he fought, 
and which conquered him. No man can with impunity insult and 
trample upon his fellow-man, even in the best of causes. Especially 
if he be an artist, he makes it impossible to obtain equitable appre- 
ciation of his work. 

So far as Milton reckoned upon a gain in experience from his 
secretaryship, he doubtless reaped it. Such a probation could not 
be passed without solidifying the judgment, and correcting its 
tendency to error. And this school of affairs, which is' indis- 
pensable for the historian, may also be available for the poet. Yet 
it would be difficult to point in Milton's subsequent poetry to any 
element which the poet can be thought to have imbibed from the 
foreign secretary. Where, in Milton's two epics and Sainson 
Agonisies^ the personages are all supernatural or heroic, there is 
no room for the employment of knowledge of the world. Had 
Milton written comedy, like Moliere, he might have said with 
Moliere after he had been introduced at court, "Je n'ai plus que 
faire d'etudier Plaute et Terence ; je n'ai qu'a etudier le monde." 

The office into which Milton was now inducted is called in the 
Council books that of Secretary for foreign tongues. Its duties 
were chiefly the translation of despatches from and to foreign 
governments. The degree of estimation in which the Latin 
secretary was held may be measured by the amount of salary 
assigned him. For while the English chief Secretary had a salary 
of 730/. (=2200/. of our day), the Latin Secretary was paid only 
288/. I3J-. dd. (=900/.). For this, not very liberal pay, he was told 
that all his time was to be at the disposal of the government. 
Lincoln's Inn Fields was too far off for a servant of the Council 
who might have to attend meetings at seven in the morning. He 
accordingly migrated to Charing Cross, now become again Charing 
without the cross, this work of art having been an early (1647) 
victim of religious barbarism. In November he was accommodated 
with chambers in Whitehall. But from these he was soon ousted 
by claimants more considerable or more importunate, and in 1651 
he removed to " a pretty garden-house " in Petty France, in West, 
minster, next door to the Lord Scudamore's, and opening into St. 
James's Park. The house was extant till 1877, when it disappeared, 
the last of Milton's many London residences. It had long ceased 
to look into St. James's Park, more than one row of houses, en- 
croachments upon the public park, having grown up between. 
The garden-house had become a mere ordinary street house in 



MILTON. 



63 



York Street, only distinguished from the squalid houses on either 
side of it by a tablet affixed by Bentham, inscribed " sacred to 
Milton, prince of poets." Petty France lost its designation in the 
French Revolution, in obedience to the childish petulance which 
obliterates the name of any one who may displease you at the 
moment, and become one of the seventeen York Streets of the 
metropolis. Soon after the rebaptism of the street, Milton's house 
was occupied by William Hazlitt, who rented it of Bentham. 
Milton had lived in it for nine years, from 1651 till a few weeks 
before the Restoration. Its nearness to Whitehall where the Coun- 
cil sat was less a convenience than a necessity. 

For Milton's life now became one of close attention and busy 
service. As Latin secretary and Weckherlin's successor, indeed, 
his proper duties were only those of a clerk or translator. But 
his aptitude for business of a literary kind soon drew on him a 
great variety of employment. The demand for a Latin transla- 
tion of a despatch was not one of frequent occurrence. The Let- 
ters of the Parliament, and of OUver and Richard, Protectors, 
which are, intrusively, printed among Milton's works, are but 
one hundred and thirty-seven in all. This number is spread over 
ten years, being at the rate of about fourteen per year; most of 
them are very short. For the purposes of a biography of Milton, 
it is sufficient to observe that the dignified attitude which the 
Commonwealth took up towards foreign powers lost none of its 
elevation in being conveyed in Miltonic Latin. Whether satisfac- 
tion for the murder of an envoy is to be extorted from the arrogant 
court of Madrid, or an apology is to be offered to a humble count 
of Oldenburg for delay in issuing a salvaguardia which had been 
promised, the same equable dignity of expression is maintained, 
equally remote from crouching before the strong and hectoring 
the weak. 

His translations were not all the duties of the new secretary. 
He must often serve as interpreter at audiences of foreign envoys. 
He must superintend the semi-official organ, the Merairms 
Poliiicus. He must answer the manifesto of the Presbyterians of 
Ireland. The Observations on the peace of Kilkenny are Milton's 
composition, but from instructions. By the peace the Irish had 
obtained home rule in its widest extent, release from the oath of 
supremacy, and the right to tie their ploughs to the tail of the 
horse. The same peace also conceded to them the militia, a trust 
which Charles I. had said he would not devolve on the Parliament 
of England, " not for an hour ! " Milton is indignant that these 
indulgences, which had been refused to their obedience, should 
have been extorted by their rebellion and the massacre of " 200,000 
Protestants." This is an exaggeration of a butchery sufficiently 
tragic in its real proportions, and in a later tract {Eikonoklastes) 
he reduces it to 154,000. Though the savage Irish are barbarians, 
uncivilised and uncivilisable, the Observations distinctly affirm the 
new principle of toleration. Though popery be a superstition, the 
death of all true religion, still conscience is not within the cogni- 



-'4 MILT®iY. 

sance of the magistrate. The civil sword is to be employed against 
civil offences only. In adding that the one exception to this 
toleration is atheism, Milton is careful to state this limitation as 
the toleration professed by Parliament, and not as his private 
opinion. 

So well satisfied were the Council with their secretary's 
Observations on the peace of Kilkenny, that they next imposed 
upon him a far more important labour, a reply to the Eikon Basilikd. 
The execution of Charles T. was not an act of vengeance, but a 
measure of public safety. If, as Hallam affirms, there mingled in 
the motives of the managers any strain of personal ill-will, this was 
merged in the imperious necessity of securing themselves from 
this vengeance, and what they had gained from being taken back. 
They were alarmed by the reaction which had set in, and had no 
choice but to strengthen themselves by a daring policy. But the 
first effect of the removal of the King by violence was to give a 
powerful stimulus to the reaction already in progress. The groan 
which burst from the spectators before Whitehall on January 29, 
1649, was only representative of the thrill of horror which ran 
through England and Scotland in the next ten days. This reac- 
tionary feeling found expression in a book entitled " Eikon Ba- 
silike, the portraiture of his sacred majesty in his solitude and 
sufferings." The book was composed by Dr. Gauden, but pro- 
fessed to be an authentic copy of papers written by the King. It 
is possible that Gauden may have had in his hands some written 
scraps of the King's meditations. If he had such, he only used 
them as hints to work upon. Gauden was a churchman whom his 
friends might call liberal and his enemies time-serving. He was a 
churchman of the stamp of Archbishop Williams, and preferred 
bishops and the Common-prayer to presbyters and extempore 
sermons, but did not think the difference between the two of the 
essence of religion. In better times Gauden would have passed 
for broad, though his latitudinarianism was more the result of love 
of ease than of philosophy. Though a royalist, he sat in the West- 
minster Assembly, and took the covenant, for which compliance he 
nearly lost the reward which, after the Restoration, became his 
due. Like the university-bred men of his day, Gauden was not a 
man of ideas, but of style. In the present instance the idea was 
supplied by events. The saint and martyr, the man of sorrows, 
praying for his murderers, the King, who renounced an earthly 
kingdom to gain a heavenly, and who in return for his benefits re- 
ceived from an unthankful people a crown of thorns — this was the 
theme supplied to the royahst advocate. Poet's imagination had 
never invented one more calculated to touch the popular heart. 
This iinitaiio Christie to which every private Christian theoretically 
aspires, had been realised by a true prince upon an actual scaffold 
with a graceful dignity of demeanour of which it may be said that 
nothing in life became him like the leaving it. 

This moving situation Gauden, no mean stylist, set out in the 
best academical language of the period. Frigid and artificial it 



MILTON. 65 

may read now, but the passion and pit}^, which is not in the book, 
was supplied by the readers of the time. And men are now dainty 
as to phrase when they meet with an expression of their own senti- 
ments. The readers of Eikon Basilikd — and forty-seven editions 
were necessary to supply the demand of a population of eight mil- 
lions — attributed to the pages of the book emotions raised in them- 
selves by the tragic catastrophe. They never doubted that the 
meditations were those of the royal martyr, and held the book, in 
the words of Sir Edward Nicholas,, for, "the most exquisite, pious, 
and princely piece ever written." The Parliament thought them- 
selves called upon to put forth a reply. If one book could cause 
such a commotion of spirits, another book could allay it — the ordi- 
nary illusion of those who do not consider that the vogue of a 
printed appeal depends, not on the contents of the appeal, but on 
a predisposition of the pubHc temper. 

Selden, the most learned man, not only of his party, but of 
Englishmen, was first thought of, but the task was finally assigned 
to the Latin Secretary. Milton's ready pen completed the answer, 
Eikonoklastes, a quarto of 242 pages, before October, 1649. It is, 
like all answers, worthless as a book. Eikonoklastes, the Image- 
breaker, takes the Image, Eikon, paragraph by paragraph, turn- 
ing it round, and asserting the negative. To the Royalist view of 
the points in dispute Milton opposes the Independent view. A re- 
futation, which follows each step of an adverse book, is necessarily 
devoid of originahty. But Milton is worse than tedious ; his reply 
is in a tone of rude railing and insolent swagger, which would 
have been always unbecoming, but which at this moment was 
grossly indecent. 

Milton must, however, lie acquitted of one charge which has 
been made against him, viz., that he taunts the King with his famil- 
iarity with Shakspeare. The charge rests on a misunderstanding. 
In quoting Richard III. in illustration of his own meaning, Milton 
says, " I shall not instance an abstruse author, wherein the King 
might be less conversant, but one whom we well know was the 
closet companion of these his solitudes, William Shakspeare." 
Though not an overt gibe, there certainly lurks an insinuation to 
Milton's Puritan readers, to whom stage plays were an abomina- 
tion—an unworthy device of rhetoric, as appealing to a super- 
stition in others which the writer himself does not share. In 
Milton's contemptuous reference to Sidney's Arcadia as a vain 
amatorious poem, we feel that the finer sense of the author of 
V Allegro has suffered from immersion in the slough of religious 
and pohtical faction. 

Gauden, raking up material from all quarters, had inserted in 
his compilation a prayer taken from the Arcadia. Milton merci- 
lessly works this topic against his adversary. It is surprising that 
this plagiarism from so well-known a book as the Arcadia should 
not have opened Milton's eyes to the unauthentic character of the 
Eikon. He alludes, indeed, to a suspicion which was abroad that 
one of the royal chaplains was a secret coadjutor. But he knew 

5 



66 MILTON. 

nothing of Gaudcn at the time of writing the Eikonoklastes, and it 
is probable he never came to know. The secret of the authorship 
of the EikoTi was well kept, being known only to a very few persons 
— the two royal brothers, Bishop Morley, the Earl of Bristol, and 
Clarendon, These were all safe men, and Gauden was not likely 
to proclaim himself an impostor. He pleaded it, however, success- 
fully as a claim to preferment at the Restoration, when the Church 
spoils came to be partitioned among the conquerors, and he re- 
ceived the bishopric of Exeter. A bishopric — because less than 
the highest perferment could not be offered to one wnose pen 
had done such signal service ; and Exeter — because the poorest 
see (then valued at 500/. a year) was good enough for a man who 
had taken the covenant and complied with the usurping govern- 
ment. By ceaselessly importunity the author of the Eikoii Basiliki 
obtained afterwards the see of Worcester, while the portion of the 
author of Eikonoklastes was poverty, infamy, and calumny. A 
century after Milton's death it was safe for the most popular writer 
of the day to say that the prayer from the Atxadia had been inter- 
polated in the Eikou by Milton himself, and then by him charged 
upon the King as a plagiarism. (Johnson, Lives of the Poets.) 



MILTON. 



67 



CHAPTER IX. 

MILTON AND SALMASIUS — BLINDNESS. 

The mystery which long surrounded the authorship of Eikon 
Basilikd lends a literary interest to Milton's share in that contro- 
versy which does not belong to his next appearance in print. 
Besides, his pamphlets against Salmasius and Morus are written 
in Latin, and to the general reader in England and America inac- 
cessible in consequence. In Milton's day it was otherwise ; the 
widest circle of readers could only be reached through Latin. For 
this reason, when Charles IL wanted a public vindication of his 
father's memory, it was indispensible that it should be composed 
in that language, The Eikon was accordingly turned into Latin, 
by one of the royal chaplains, Earle, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. 
But this was not enough ; a defence in form was necessary, an 
Apologia Socratis^ such as Plato composed for his master after 
his death. It must not only be written in Latin, but in such Latin 
as to ensure its being read. 

In 1647 Charles II. was living at the Hague, and it so hap- 
pened that the man who was in the highest repute in all Europe as 
a Latinist was professor at the neighbouring university of Leyden. 
Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise) was commissioned to prepare a 
manifesto, which should be at once a vindication of Charles's mem- 
ory, and an indictment against the regicide government. Salma- 
si-us was a man of enormous reading and no judgment. He says 
of himself that he wrote Latin more easily than his mother-tongue 
(French). And his Latin was all the more readable because it was 
not classical or idiomatic. With all his reading — and Isaac Casau- 
bon had said of him when in his teens that he had incredible eru- 
dition — he was still, at sixty, quite unacquainted with public affairs, 
and had neither the politician's tact necessary to draw a state paper 
as Clarendon would have drawn it, nor the literary tact which had 
enabled Erasmus to command the ear of the public. Salmasius 
undertook his task as a professional advocate, though without pay, 
and Milton accepted the duty of replying as advocate for the 
Parliament, also without reward ; he was fighting for a cause which 
was not another's, but his own. 

Salmasius's Defensio regia — that was the title of his book- 
reached England before the end of 1649. The Council of State, 



68 MILTON. 

in very unnecessary alarm, issued a prohibition. On 8th Jnnunry. 
1650, the Council ordered "that Mr. Milton do prepare something 
in answer to the book of Salmasius." Early in March, 1O51, 
Milton's answer, entitled Pro Populo Anglicano Defcnsio, was out. 

Milton was as much above Salmasius in mental power as he 
was inferior to him in extent of book knowledge. But the con- 
ditions of retort which he had chosen to accept neutralised this 
superiority. His greater power was spent in a greater force of 
invective. Instead of setting out the case of the Parliament in all 
the strength of which it was capable, Milton is intent upon trip- 
ping up Salmasius, contradicting him, and making him odious or 
ridiculous. He called his booJ< a Defence of the People of England j 
but when he should have been justifying his clients from the 
charges of rebellion and regicide before the bar of Europe, Milton 
is bending all his invention upon personalties. He exaggerates 
the foibles of Salmasius, his vanity, and the vanity of Madame 
Salmasius, her ascendancy over her husband, his narrow pedantry, 
his ignorance of everything but grammar and words. He exhausts 
the Latin vocabulary of abuse to pile up every epithet of contumely 
and execration on the head of his adversary. It but amounts to 
calling Salmasius fool and knave through a couple of hundred 
pages, till the exaggeration of the style defeats the orator's purpose, 
and we end by regarding the whole, not as a serious pleading, but 
as an epideictic display. Hobbeb said truly that the two books 
were " like two declamations, for and against, made by one and the 
same man as a rhetorical exercise " {Behenioth). 

Milton's Defensio was not calculated to advance the cause of 
the Parliament, and there is no evidence that it produced any effect 
upon the public beyond that of raising Milton's personal credit. 
That England, and Puritan England, where humane studies were 
swamped in a biblical brawl, should produce a man who could 
write Latin as well as Salmasius, was a great surprise to the learned 
world in Holland. Salmasius was unpopular at Leyden, and there 
was therefore a predisposition to regard Milton's book with favour. 
Salmasius was twenty years older than Milton, and in these literary 
digladiations readers are always ready to side with a new writer. 
The contending interests of the two great English parties, the 
wider issue between republic and absolutism, the speculative in- 
quiry into the right of resistance, were lost sight of by the specta- 
tors of this literary duel. The only question was whether Salma- 
sius could beat the new champion, or the new man beat Salmasius, 
at a match of vituperation, 

Salmasius of course put in a rejoinder. His rapid pen found 
no difficulty in turning off 300 pages of fluent Latin. It was his 
last occupation. He died at Spa,"where he was taking the waters, 
in September, 1653, and his reply was not published till 1660, after 
the Restoration, when all interested had died out of the contro- 
versy. If it be true that the work was written at Spa, without 
books at hand, it is certainly a miraculous effort of memory. It 
does no credit to Salmasius'. He had raked together, after the ex< 



MILTON-. 69 

ample of Scioppius against Scaliger, all the tittle-tattle which the 
English exiles had to retail about Milton and his antecedents. 
Bramhall, who bore Milton a special grudge, was the channel of 
some of this scandal, and Bramhall's source was possibly Chappell, 
the tutor with whom Milton had had the early misunderstanding. 
(See above p. 10.) If anyone thinks that classical studies of them- 
selves cultivate the taste and the sentiments, let him look into 
Salmasius's Respojisio. There he will see the first scholar of his 
age not thinking it unbecoming to taunt Milton with his blindness, 
in such language as this : "A puppy, once my pretty little man, 
now blear-eyed, or rather a blindling; having never had any mental 
vision, he has now lost his bodily sight; a silly coxcomb, fancying 
himself a beauty ; an unclean beast, with nothing more human 
about him than his guttering eyelids : the fittest doom for him 
would be to hang him on the highest gallows, and set his head on 
the Tower of London." These are some of the incivilities, not by 
any means the most revolting, but such as I dare reproduce, of this 
literary warfare. 

Salmasius's taunt about Milton's venal pen is no less false than 
his other gibes. The places of those who served the Common- 
wealth were places of "hard work and short rations." Milton 
never received for his Z)r/1:;/^?^ a sixpence beyond his official salary. 
It has indeed been asserted that he was paid 1000/. for it by order 
of Parliament, and this falsehood having been adopted by Johnson 
— himself a pensioner — has passed into all the biographies, and 
will no doubt continue to be repeated to the end of time. This is 
a just nemesis upon Milton, who on his part had twitted Salmasjus 
with having been complimented by the exiled King with a purse of 
100 Jacobuses for his performance. The one insinuation was as 
false as the other. Charles II. was too poor to offer more than 
thanks. Milton was too proud to receive for defending his country 
what the Parliament was willing to pay. Sir Peter Wentworth, of 
Lillingston Lovell, in Oxfordshire, left in his will 100/. to Milton 
for his book against Salmasius. But this was long after the Res- 
toration, and Milton did not live to receive the legacy. 

Instead of receiving an honorarium for his Defence of the Eng- 
lish People, Milton had paid for it a sacrifice for which money 
could not compensate him. His eyesight, though quick, as he was 
a proficient with the rapier, had never'been strong. His constant 
headaches, his late study, and (thinks Phillips) his perpetual tam- 
pering with physic to preserve his sight, concurred to bring the 
calamity upon him. It had been steadily coming on for a dozen 
years before, and about 1650 the sight of the left eye was gone. 
He was warned by his doctor that if he persisted in using the 
remaining eye for book-work, he would lose that too. " The choice 
lay before me," Milton writes in the Second Defence, between 
dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight ; in such a case 
I could not listen to the physician, not if .^sculapius himself had 
spoken from his sanctuary ; I could not but obey that inward 
monitor, I know not what, that spake to me from heaven. I con- 



70 



MILTON. 



sidered with myself that many had purchased less good with worse 
ill, as they who give their lives to reap only glory, and I thereupon 
concluded to employ the little remaining eyesight I was to enjoy in 
doing this, the greatest service to the common weal it was in my 
power to render." 

It was about the early part of the year 1652 that the calamity 
was consummated. At the age of forty-three he was in total dark- 
ness. The deprivation of sight, one of the severest afflictions of 
which humanity is capable, falls more heavily on the man whose 
occupation lies among books than upon others. He who has most 
to lose, loses most To most persons books are but an amuse- 
ment, an interlude between the hours of serious occupation. The 
scholar is he who has found the key to knowledge, and knows his 
way about in the world of printed books. To find this key, to 
learn the map of this country, requires a long apprenticeship. 
This is a point few men can hope to reach much before the age 
of forty. Milton had attained it only to find fruition snatched from 
him. He had barely time to spell one line in the book of wisdom, 
before, like the v/izard's volume in romance, it was hopelessly 
closed against him for ever. Any human being is shut out by loss 
of sight from accustomed pleasures, the scholar is shut out from 
knowledge. Shut out at forty-three, when his great work was not 
even begun ! He consoles himself with the fancy that in his 
pamphlet, the Defensio, he had done a great work {quanta 
7naxima quivi) for his country. This poor delusion helped him 
doubtless to support his calamity. He could not foresee that, in 
less than ten years, the great work would be totally annihilated, his 
pamphlet would be merged in the obsolete mass of civil war tracts, 
and the Defensio. on which he had expended his last year of eye- 
sight, only mentioned because it had been written by the author 
of Paradise Lost. 

The nature of Milton's disease is not ascertainable from the 
account he has given of it. In the well-known passage of Paradise 
Lost, iii. 25, he hesitates between amaurosis (drop serene) and 
taract (suffusion) — 

" So thick a drop serene hath quench'd their orbs, 
Or dim suffusion veil'd." 

A medical friend, referred to by Professor Alfred Stern, tells 
him that some of the symptoms are more like glaucoma. Milton 
himself has left such an account as a patient ignorant of the 
anatomy of the organ could give. It throws no light on the nature 
of the malady. But it is characteristic of Milton that even his 
affliction does not destroy his solicitude about his personal ap- 
pearance. The taunts of his enemies about " the lack-lustre eye, 
guttering with prevalent rheum," did not pass unfelt. In his 
Second Defence Milton informs the world that his eyes "are 
externally uninjured. They shine with an unclouded light, just 
like the eyes of one whose vision is perfect. This is the only 



MILTON. yi 

point in which I am, against my will, a hypocrite. The vindi- 
cation appears again in Sonnet xix. " These eyes, though clear to 
outward view of blemish or of spot." In later years, when the 
exordium of Book iii. of Paradise Lost was composed, in the 
pathetic story of his blindness this little touch of vanity fades away 
as incompatible with the solemn dignity of the occasion. 



jZ MILTON. 



CHAPTER X. 

MILTON AND MORUS— THE SECOND DEFENCE— THE DEFENCE FOR 

HIMSELF. 

Civil history is largely a history of wars between states, and 
literary history is no less the record of quarrels in print between 
jealous authors. Poets and artists, more susceptible than prac- 
tical men, seem to live a life of perpetual wrangle. The history of 
these petty feuds is not healthy intellectual food, it is as best 
amusing scandal. But these quarrels of authors do not degrade the 
authors in our eyes, they only show them to be, what we knew, 
as vain, irritable, and opinionative as other men. Ben Jonson, 
Dryden, Pope, Voltaire, Rousseau, belabour their enemies, and we 
see nothing incongruous in their doing so. It is not so when the 
awful maje:^iyof Milton descends from the empyrean throne of 
contemplati^ n to use the language of the gutter or the fish-market. 
The bathos is unthinkable. The universal intellect of Bacon 
shrank to the paltry pursuit of place. The disproportion between 
the intellectual capaciousness and the moral aim jars upon the 
sense of fitness, and the name of Bacon, wisest, meanest, has 
passed into a proverb. Milton's fall is far worse. It is not here a 
union of grasp of mind with an ignoble ambition, but the plunge of 
the moral nature itself from the highest heights to that despicable 
region of vulgar scurrility and libel which is below the level of 
average gentility and education. The name of Milton is a syno- 
nym for sublimity. He has endowed our language with the loftiest 
and noblest poetry it possesses, and the same man is found 
employing speech for the most unworthy purpose to which it can 
be put, that of defaming and vilifying a personal enemy, and an 
enemy so mean that barely to have been mentioned by Milton had 
been an honour to him. In Salmasius, Milton had at least been 
measuring his Latin against the Latin of the first classicist of tho 
age. In Alexander Morus he wreaked august periods of Roman 
eloquence upon a vagabond preacher, of chance fortunes and 
tarnished reputation, a grcECitlus esiiriens^ who appeared against 
Milton by the turn of accidents, and not as the representative of • 
the opposite principle. In crushing Morus, Milton could not 
beguile himself with the idea that he was serving a cause. 

In 1652 our country began to reap the fruits of the costly efforts 



MILTON. 73 

it had made to obtain good government. A central authority was 
at last established, stronger than any which had existed since 
Elizabeth, and one which extended over Scotland and Ireland, no 
less than over England. The ecclesiastical and dynastic aims of 
the Stuart monarchy had been replaced by a national policy, in 
which the interests of the people of Great Britain sprang to the 
first place. The immediate consequence of this union of vigour 
and patriotism, in the government, was the self-assertion of Eng- 
land as a commercial, and therefore as a naval power. This 
awakened spirit of conscious strength meant war with the Dutch, 
who, while England was pursuing ecclesiastical ends, had possessed 
themselves of the trade of the world. War accordingly broke out 
early in 1652. Even before it came to real fighting, the war of 
pamphlets had recommenced. The prohibition of Salmasius's 
Defensio regla annulled itself as a matter of course, and Salmasiuif 
was free to prepare a second Defensio in answer to Milton; for the 
most vulnerable point of the new English Commonwealth waa 
through the odium excited on the Continent against regicide 
And the quarter from which the monarchical pamphlets were hurled 
against the English republic w^as the press of the republic of the 
United Provinces, the country which had set the first example of 
successful rebellion against its lawful prince. 

Before Salmasius's reply was ready, there was launched from 
the Hague, in March, 1652, a virulent royahst piece in Latin, under 
the title of Regit saiigninis clai)ior ad ccehtm (Cry of the King's 
blood to Heaven against the English parricides). Its 160 pages 
contained the usual royalist invective in a rather common style of 
hyperbolical declamation, such as that " in comparison of the ex- 
ecution of Charles I., the guilt of the Jews in crucifying Christ was 
as nothing." Exaggerated praises of Salmasius were followed by 
scurrilous and rabid abuse of Milton. In the style of the most 
shameless Jesuit lampoon, the Ajiiphitheatnun or the Scaliger 
hypobolimceiis, and with Jesuit tactics, every odious crime -is im- 
puted to the object of the satire, without regard to truth or prob- 
ability. Exiles are proverbially credulous, and it is hkely enough 
that the gossip of the English refugees at the Hague w^as much 
employed in improving or inventing stories about the man who had 
dared to answer the royalist champion in Latin as good as his own. 
Salmasius in his Defensio had employed these stories, distorting 
the events of Milton's life to discredit him. But for the author of 
the Clamor there was no such excuse, for the book was composed 
in England, by an author living in Oxford and London, who had 
every opportunity for informing himself accurately of the facts 
about Milton's life and conversation. He chose rather to heap up 
at random the traditional vocabulary of defamation which the Cath- 
olic theologians had employed for some generations past as their 
best weapon against their adversaries. In these infamous pro- 
ductions, hatched by celibate pedants in the foul atmosphere of 
the Jesuit colleges, the gamut of charges always ranges from bad 
grammar to unnatural crime. The only circumstance which can 



74 



MIL TON. 



be alleged in mitigation of the excesses of the Regit sangtiiiiis 
clamor is that Milton had provoked the onfall by his own violence. 
He who throws dirt must expect that dirt will be thrown back at 
him; and when it comes to mud-throwing, the blackguard has, as 
it is right that he should have, the best of it. 

The author of the Clamor was Peter Du Moulin, a son of the 
celebrated French Calvinist preacher of the same name. The 
author, not daring to intrust his pamphlet to an English press, had 
sent it over to Holland, where it was printed under the supervision 
of Alexander Morus. This Morus (More or Moir) was of Scottish 
parentage, but born (1616) at Castres, where his father was prin- 
cipal of tlie Protestant college. JMorus fitted the Chwior with a 
preface, in which Milton was further reviled, and styled a " mon- 
strum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademtum." The 
secret of the authorship was strictly kept, and Morus, having been 
known to be concerned in the publication, was soon transformed in 
public belief into the author. So it was reported to Milton, and so 
Milton believed. He nursed his wrath, and took two years to 
meditate his blow. He caused inquiries to be made nito Morus's 
antecedents. It happened that Morus's conduct had been want- 
ing in discretion, especially in his relations with women. He had 
been equally imprudent in his utterances on some of the certainties 
of Calvinistic divinity. It was easy to collect any amount of 
evidence under both these heads. The system of kirk discipline 
offered a ready-made machinery of espionage and delation. The 
standing jest of the fifteenth century on the "governante " of the 
cure was replaced, in Calvinistic countries, by the anxiety of every 
minister to detect his brother minister in any intimacy upon which 
a scandalous construction could be put. 

Morus endeavoured, through every channel at his command, to 
convince Milton that he was not the author of the Clamor. He 
could have saved himself by revealing the real author, who was 
lurking all the while close to Milton's elbow, and whose" safety 
depended on Morus's silence. This high-minded respect for an- 
other's secret is more to Morus's honour than any of the petty 
gossip about him is to his discredit. He had nothing to offer, 
therefore, but negative assurances, and mere denial weighed noth- 
ing with Milton, who was fully convinced that Morus lied from ter- 
ror. Milton's Dcfensio Secnnda came out in May, 1654. In this 
piece (written in Latin) Morus is throughout assumed to be the 
author of the Clamor., and as such is pursued through many pages 
in a strain of invective, in which banter is mingled with ferocity. 
The Hague tittle-tattle about Morus's love-affairs is set forth in tb.e 
pomp of Milton's loftiest Latin. Sonorous periods could hardly l;)e 
more disproportioned to their material content. To have kissed a 
girl is painted as the blackest of crimes. The sublime and the 
ridiculous are here blended without the step between. Milton de- 
scends even to abuse the publisher, Viae, w!io had officially signed 
his name to Morus's preface. The mixture of fanatical choler and 



MILTON-. y^ 

grotesque jocularity, m which he rolls forth his charges of inconti- 
nence against Morus, and of petty knavery against Viae, are only 
saved from being unseemly by being ridiculous. The comedy is 
complete when we remember that Morus had not written the 
C/amo/-, nor VlsiC the preface. Milton's rage blinded him; he is 
mad Ajax castigating innocent sheep instead of Achaeans. 

The Latin pamphlets are indispensable to a knowledge of Mil- 
ton's disposition. We see in them his grand disdain of his oppo- 
nents, reproducing the concentrated intellectual scorn of the Latin 
Persius ; his certainty of the absolute justice of his own cause,' 
and the purity of his own motives. This lofty cast of thought is 
combined with an eagerness to answer the meanest taunts. The 
intense subjectivity of the poet breaks out in these paragraphs, 
and while he should be stating the case of the republic, he holds 
^Europe listening to an account of himself, his accomplishments, 
his studies and travels, his stature, the colour of his eyes, his skill 
in fencing, etc. These egotistic utterances must have seemed to 
Milton's cotemporaries to be intrusive and irrelevant vanity. 
Paradise Lost was not as yet, and to the Council of State Milton 
was, what he was to Whitelocke, "a blind man who wrote Latin.'' 
But these paragraphs, in which he talks of himself^ are to us the 
only living fragments out of many hundred worthless pages. 

To the Defensio Secimda there was of course a reply by Morus. 
It was entitled Fides PnbHca, because it was largely composed 
of testimonials to character. When one priest charges another 
with unchastity, the world looks on and laughs. But it is no laugh- 
ing matter to the defendant in such an action. He can always 
bring exculpatory evidence, and in spite of any evidence he is 
always believed to be guilty. The effect of Miltons furious de- 
nunciation of Morus had been to damage his credit in religious 
circles, and to make mothers of families shy of allowing him to 
visit at their houses. 

Milton might have been content with a victory which, as Gibbon 
said of his own, "over such an antagonist was a sufficient humilia- 
tion." Milton's magnanimity was no match for his irritation. He 
published a rejoinder to Morus's Fides Piiblica, reiterating his be- 
lief that Morus was author of the Clamor, but that it was no 
matter whether he was or not, since by pubhshing the book, and 
furnishing it with a recommendatory preface, he had made it his 
own. The charges against Morus's character he reiterated, and 
strengthened by new " facts," which Morus's enemies had hastened 
to contribute to the budget of calumny. These imputations on 
character, mixed with insinuations of unorthodoxy such as are 
ever rife in clerical controversy, Milton invests with the moral in- 
dignation of a prophet denouncing the enemies of Jehovah. He 
expends a wealth of vituperative Latin which makes us tremble, 
till we remember that it is put in motion to crush an insect: 

This Pro se defensio (Defence for himself) appeared in August, 
1655. Morus met it by a supplementary Fides Piublca^ and Milton, 



y5 MILTON. 

resolved to have the last word, met him by a Supplement to tlie 
Defence. The reader will be glad to hear that this is the end of 
the Morus controversy. We leave Milton's victim buried under 
•the mountains of opprobrious Latin here heaped upon him — this 
" circumforaneus pliarmacopola, vanissimus circulator, propudium 
hominis et prostibulum." 



MILTON. 



77 



CHAPTER XI. 

LATIN SECRETARYSHIP COMES TO AN END— MILTON'S FRIENDS. 

It is no part of Milton's biography to relate the course of pub- 
lic events in these momentous years, merely because, as Latin 
Secretary, he formulated the despatches of the Protector or of his 
Council, and because these Latin letters are incorporated in Mil- 
ton's works. On the course of affairs Milton's voice had no in- 
fluence, as he had no part in their transaction. ?vIilton was the 
last man of whom a practical politician would have sought advice. 
He knew nothing of the temper of the nation, and treated all that 
opposed his own view with supreme disdain. On the other hand, 
ideahst though he was. he does not move in the sphere of specu- 
lative politics, or count among those philosophic names, a few in 
each century, who have influenced not action, but thought. Ac- 
cordingly his opinions have for us a purely personal interest. 
They are part of the character of the poet Milton, and do not be- 
long to either world, of action or of thought. 

The course of his political convictions up to 1654 has been 
traced in our narrative thus far. His breeding at home, at school, 
at college, was that of a member of the Established Church, but 
of the Puritan and Calvinistic, not of the Laudian and Arminian, 
party within its pale. By 1641 we find that his Puritanism has de- 
veloped into Presbyterianism ; he desires, not to destroy the Church, 
but to reform it by abolishing government by bishops, and substi- 
tuting the Scotch or Genevan discipline. When he wrote his Rea- 
son of Church Government (1642), he is still a royalist; not in the 
cavalier sense of a person attached to the reigning sovereign, or 
the Stuart family, but still retaining the belief of his age that 
monarchy in the abstract had somewhat of divine sanction. Be- 
fore 1649 tl^6 divine right of monarchy, and the claim of Presby- 
tery to be scriptural, have yielded in his mind to a wider conception 
of the rights of the man and the Christian. To use the party 
names of the time, Milton the Presbyterian has expanded into 
Milton the Independent. There is to be no State Church, and in- 
stead of a monarchy there is to be a commonwealth. Very soon 
the situation develops the important question how this common- 
wealth shall be administered — whether by a representative assem- 
bly, or by a picked council, or a single governor. This question 



^8 MILTON. 

was put to a practical test in the Parliament of 1654. The expert* 
ment, begun in September, 1654, broke down, as we know in Janu- 
ary, 1655. Before it was tried we find Milton in his Second Defence^ 
in May, 1654, recommending Cromwell to govern not by a Parlia' 
ment, but by a council of officers ; i. e., he is a commonwealth's 
man. Arrived at this point, w^ould Milton take his stand upon 
doctrinaire repubhcanism, and lose sight of liberty in the attempt 
to secure equality, as his friends Vane, Overton, Bradshaw would 
have done? Or would his idealist exaltation sweep him on into 
some one of the current fanaticisms, Leveller, Fifth Monarchy, or 
Muggletonian ? Unpractical as he was, he was close enough to 
state affairs as Latin Secretary to see that personal government by 
the Protector was, at the moment, the only solution. If the liber 
ties that had been conquered by the sword were to be maintained, 
between levelling chaos on the one hand, and royalist reaction on 
the other, it was the Protector alone to whom those who prized 
liberty above party names could look. Accordingly Milton may be 
regarded from the year 1654 onwards as an Oliverian, though with 
particular reservations. He saw — it was impossible for a man in 
his situation not to see — the unavoidable necessity which forced 
Cromwell, at this moment, to undertake to govern without a repre- 
sentative assembly. The political necessity of the situation was 
absolute, and all reasonable men who were embarked in the cause 
felt it to be so. 

Through all these stages Milton passed in the space of twenty 
years — Church-Puritan, Presbyterian, Royalist, Independent, Com- 
monwealth's man, Oliverian. These political phases were not the 
acquiescence of a placeman, or indifferentist, in mutations for 
which he does not care ; still less were they changes either of 
party or of opinion. Whatever he thought, Milton thought and 
felt intensely, and expressed emphatically ; and* even his enemies 
could not accuse him of a shadow of inconsistency or wavering in 
his principles. On the contrary, tenacity, or persistence of idea, 
amounted in him to a serious defect of character. A conviction 
once formed dominated him, so that, as in the controversy wnth 
Morus, he could not be persuaded that he had made a mistake. 
No mind, the history of which we have an opportunity of intimately 
studying, could be more of one piece and texture than was that of 
Milton from youth to age. The names which we are obliged to 
give to his successive political stages do not indicate shades of 
colour adopted from the prevailing political ground, but the gen- 
uine development of the public consciousness of Puritan England 
repeated in an individual. Milton moved forward, not because 
Cromwell and the rest advanced, but with Cromwell and the rest. 
We may perhaps describe the motive force as a passionate attach- 
ment to personal liberty, liberty of thought and action. This ideal 
force working in the minds of a few, " those worthies which are 
the soul of that enterprise " {Tenure of Kings), had been the main- 
spring of the whole revolution. The Levellers, Quakers, Fifth 
Monarchy men, and the wilder Anabaptist sects, only showed the 



MILTON. 



79 



workings of the same idea in men whose intellects had not been 
disciplined by education or experience. The idea of liberty, for- 
mulated into a doctrine, and bowed down to as a holy creed, made 
some of its best disciples, such as Harrison and Overton, useless 
at the most critical juncture. The party of anti-Oliverian repub- 
licans, the intransigentes, became one of the greatest difficulties of 
the Government. Milton, with his idealism, his thoroughness, and 
obstinate persistence, was not unlikely to have shipwrecked upon 
the same rock. He was saved by his constancy to the principle of 
religious hberty, which was found with the party that had destroyed 
the King because he would not be ruled by a Parliament, while in 
1655 it supported the Protector in governing without a Parliament. 
Supreme authority in itself was not Cromwell's aim ; he used it 
only to secure the fulfilment of those ideas of religious hbert}-, 
civil order, and Protestant ascendancy in Europe which filled his 
whole soul. To r4ilton, as to Cromwell, forms, whether of worship 
or government, were but means to an end, and were to be changed 
whenever expediency might require. 

In 1655, then, Milton was an Oliverian, but with reservations. 
The most important of these reservations regarded the relation of 
the state to the church. Cromwell never wholly dropped the 
scheme of a national church. It was, indeed, to be as comprehen- 
sive as possible ; Episcopacy was pulled down, Presbytery was not 
set up, but individual ministers might be Episcopahan or Pres- 
byterian in sentiment, provided they satisfied a certain standard, 
intelligible enough to that generation, of " godliness." Here 
Milton seems to have remained throughout upon the old Indepen- 
dent platform ; he will not have the civil power step over its limits 
into the province of religion at all. Many matters, in which the 
old prelatic church had usurped upon the domain of the state, 
should be replaced under the secular authority. But the spiritual 
region was matter of conscience, and not of external regulation. 

A further reservation which Milton would make related to en- 
dowments, or the maintenance of ministers. The Protectorate, 
and the constitution of 1657, maintained an established clergy in 
the enjoyment of tithes or other settled stipends. Nothing was 
more abhorrent to Milton's sentiment than state payment in relig- 
ious things. The minister who receives such pay becomes a state 
pensioner, a hirehng. The law of tithes is a Jewish law, repealed 
by the Gospel, under which the minister is only maintained by the 
freewill offerings of the congregation to which he ministers. This 
antipathy to hired preachers was one of Milton's earliest convic 
tions. It thrusts itself, rather importunately, into Lycidas (1636), 
and reappears in the Sonnet to Cromwell (^^;///t'/ xvii., 1652), before 
it is dogmatically expounded in the pamphlet Considerations touch- 
ing means to 7'emove Hirelings ont of the Church (1659). Of the 
two corruptions of the church by the secular power, one by force, 
the other by pay, Milton regards the last as the most dangerous. 
" Under force, though no thanks to the forcers, true religion oft- 
times best thrives an"d flourishes ; but the corruption of teachers, 



% 



8o MILTON. 

most commonly the effect of hire, is the very bane of truth in them 
who are so corrupted." Nor can we tax this aversion to a salaried 
ministry, with being a monomania of sect. It is essentially in- 
volved in the conception of religion as a spiritual state, a state of 
grace. A soul in this state can only be ministered to by a brother 
in a like frame of mind. To assign a place with- a salary, is to offer 
a pecuniary inducement to simulate this qualification. This prin- 
ciple may be wrong, but it is not unreasonable. It is the very 
principle on which the England of our day has decided against the 
endowment of science. The endowment of the church' was to 
Milton the poison of religion, and in so thinking he was but true 
to his conception of religion. Cromwell, whatever may have been 
his speculative opinions, decided in favour of a state endowment, 
upon the reasons, or some of them, which have moved modern 
statesmen to maintain church establishments. 

With whatever reservations, Milton was an Oliverian. Sup- 
porting the Protector's policy, he admired his conduct, and has 
recorded his admiration in the memorable sonnet xii. How the 
Protector thought of Milton, or even that he knew him at all, there 
remains no evidence. Napoleon said of Corneille that, if he had 
lived in his day, he would have made him his first minister. 
Milton's ideas were not such as could have value in the eyes of a 
practical statesman. Yet Cromwell was not always taking advice, 
or discussing business. He who could take a liking for the genuine 
inwardness of the enthusiast George Fox might have been ex- 
pected to appreciate equal unworldliness joined with culture and 
reading in Milton. " If " says Neal, '^ there was a man in England 
who excelled in any faculty or science, the Protector would find 
him out and reward him." But the excellence which the Protector 
prized was aptness for public employment, and this was the very 
quality in which Milton was deficient. 

The poverty of Milton's state letters has been often remarked. 
Whenever weighty negociations are going on, other pens than his 
are employed. We ma}- ascribe this to his blindness. Milton 
could only dictate, and therefore everything intrusted to him must 
pass through an amanuensis, who might blab. One exception to 
the commonplace character of the state papers there is. The 
massacre of the Vaudois by their own sovereign, Charles Emanuel 
II., Duke of Savoy, excited a thrill of horror in England greater 
than the massacres of Scio or of Batak roused in our time. For 
in Savoy it was not humanity only that was outraged, it was a 
deliberate assault of the Papal half of Europe upon an outpost of 
the Protestant cause. 

One effect of the Puritan revolution had been to alter entirely 
the foreign policy of England. By nature, by geographical position, 
by commercial occupations, and the free spirit of the natives, these 
islands were marked out to be members of the Northern confede- 
racy of progressive and emancipated Europe. The foreign policy 
of Elizabelrfi had been steady adhesion to this law of nature. The 
two first Stuarts, coquetting with semi-catholicism at home, had 



MILTON. 8 1 

leaned with all the weight of the crown and ot government towards 
Catholic connexions. The country had always offered a vain resist- 
ance ; the Parliament of 1621 had been dismissed for advising 
James to join the Continental Protestants against Spain. It was 
certain, therefore, that when the government became Puritan, its 
foreign policy would again become that of Elizabeth. This must 
have been the case even if Cromwell had not been there. He saw 
not only that England must be a partner in the general Protestant 
interest, but that it fell to England to make the combination 
and to lead it. He acted in this with his usual decision. He 
placed England in her natural antagonism to Spain ; he made peace 
with the Dutch ; he courted the friendship of the Swiss Cantons, 
and the alliance of the Scandinavian and German Princes ; and to 
France, which had a divided interest, he made advantageous offers 
provided the Cardinal would disconnect himself from the Ultra- 
montane party. 

It was in April, 1655, that the Vaudois atrocities suddenly 
added the impulse of religious sympathy to the permanent gravita- 
tion of the political forces. In all Catholic countries the Jesuits 
had by this time made themselves masters of the councils of the 
princes. The aim of Jesuit policy in the seventeenth century was 
nothing less than the entire extirpation of Protestantism and Pro- 
testants in the countries which they ruled. The inhabitants of 
certain Piedmontese valleys had held from time immemorial, and 
long before Luther, tenets and forms of worship very like those to 
which the German reformers had sought to bring back the church. 
The Vaudois were wretchedly poor, and had been incessantly the 
objects of aggression and persecution. In Januar}', 1655, a sudden 
determination was taken by the Turin government to make them 
conform to the Catholic religion by force. The whole of the 
inhabitants of three valleys were ordered to quit the country within 
three days, under pain of death and confiscation of goods, unless 
they would become, or undertake to become, Catholic. They sent 
their humble remonstrances to the court of Turin against this edict. 
The remonstrances were disregarded, and military execution was 
ordered. On April 17, 1655, the soldiers, recruits from all coun- 
tries — the Irish are specially mentioned — were let loose upon the 
unarmed population. Murder and rape and burning are the ordi- 
nary incidents of military execution. These were not enough to 
satisfy the ferocity of the Catholic soldiery, who revelled for many 
days in the infliction of all that brutal lust or savage cruelty can 
suggest to men. 

It was nearly a month before the news reached England. A cry 
of horror went through the country, and Cromwell said it came 
" as near his heart as if his own nearest and dearest had been con- 
cerned." A day of humiliation was appointed, large collections 
were made for the sufferers, and a special envoy was despatched 
to remonstrate with the Duke of Savoy. Cardinal Mazarin, how- 
ever, seeing the importance which the Lord Protector would acquire 
by taking the lead on this occasion, stepped in, and patched up a 

6 



82 MILTON. 

hasty arrrangement, the treat}^ of Pigneroi, b}^ which some sort of 
fallacious protection was ostensibly secured to the survivors of the 
massacre. 

All the despatches in this business were composed by Milton. 
But he only found tlie words ; especially in the letter to the Duke 
of Savoy, the tone of which is much more moderate than we should 
have expected, considering that Blake was in the Mediterranean, 
and master of the coasts of the Duke's dominions. It is impossi- 
ble to extract from these letters any characteristic trait, unless it is 
from the speech which the envoy, Morland, was instructed to de- 
liver at Turin, in which it is said that all the Neros of all ages had 
never contrived inhumanities so atrocious as what had taken place 
in the Vaudois valleys. Thus restricted in his official communica- 
tions, Milton gave vent to his personal feelings on the occasion in 
the well-knowli sonnet (xviii.) " Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered 
saints, whose bones lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold." 

It has been already said that there remains no trace of 
any personal intercourse between Milton and Cromwell. He 
seems to have remained equally unknown to, or unregarded by, the 
other leading men in the Government or the Councih It is vain 
to conjecture the cause of this general neglect. Some have found 
it in the coldness with which Milton regarded, parts at least of, the 
policy of the Protectorate. Others refer it to the haughty nature 
of the man, who will neither ask a favour nor make the first ad- 
vances towards intimacy. This last supposition is nearer the truth 
than the former. An expression he uses in a private letter may be 
cited in its support. Writing to Peter Heimbach in 1657, to 
excuse himself from giving him a recommendation to the Enghsh 
ambassador in Holland, he says : " I am sorry that I am not able 
to do this ; I have very little acquaintance with those in power, 
inasmuch as I keep very much to my own house, and prefer to do 
so." Something may also be set down to the character of the 
Puritan leaders, alien to all literature, and knowing no books but 
the Bible. 

The mental isolation in which the great poet lived his life is a 
remarkable feature of his biography. It was not only after the 
Restoration that he appears lonely and friendless ; it was much the 
same during the previous period of the Parliament and the Pro- 
tectorate. Just at one time, about 1641, we hear from our best 
authority, Phillips, of his cultivating the society of men of his own 
age, and " keeping a gawdy-day," but this only once in three weeks 
or a month, with " two gentlemen of Gray's Inn." He had, there- 
fore, known what it was to be sociable. But the general tenor of 
his life was other : proud, reserved, self-contained, _ repellent ; 
brooding over his own ideas, not easily admitting into his mind the 
ideas of others. It is indeed an erroneous estimate of Milton to 
attribute to him a hard or austere nature. He had all the quick 
sensibility which belongs to the poetic temperament, and longed to 
be loved that he might love again. But he had to pay the penalty 
of all who believe in their own ideas, in that their ideas come be- 



MILTON. 83 

tween them and the persons that approach them, and constitute a 
mental barrier which can only be broken down by sympathy. And 
sympathy for ideas is hard to find, just in proportion as those ideas 
are profound, far-reaching, the fruit of long study and meditation. 
Hence it was that Milton did not associate readily with his cotem- 
poraries, but was affable and instructive in conversation with young 
persons, and those who would approach him in the attitude of 
disciples. His daughter Deborah, who could tell so httle about 
him, remembered that he was delightful company, the life of a 
circle, and that he was so through a flow of subjects and an un- 
affected cheerfulness and civility. I would interpret this testimony, 
the authenticity of which is indisputable, of his demeanour with the 
young, and those who were modest enough to wait upon his utter- 
ances. His isolation from his coevals, and from those who offered 
resistance, was the necessary consequence of his force of character, 
and the moral tenacity which endured no encroachment on the 
narrow scheme of thought over which it was incessantly brooding. 

Though " his literat'ure was immense," there was no humanity 
in it ; it was fitted immovably into a scholastic frame-work. Hence 
literature was not a bond of sympathy between him and other men. 
We find him in no intimate relation with any of the contemporary 
men of learning, poets, or wits. From such of them as were of the 
cavalier party he was estranged by politics. That it was Milton's 
interposition which saved Davenant's life in 165 1, even were the 
story better authenticated than it is, is not an evidence of intimacy. 
The three men most eminent for learning (in the usually received 
sense of the word) in England at that day were Selden (d. 1654), 
Gataker (d. 1654), and Archbishop Usher (d. 1656), all of whom 
were to be found in London. With none of the three is there any 
trace of Milton ever having had intercourse. 

It is probable, but not certain, that it was at Milton's interces- 
sion that the Council proposed to subsidise Brian Walton in his 
great enterprise — the Polyglot Bible. This, the noblest monument 
of the learning of the Anglican Church, was projected and executed 
by the silenced clergy. Fifteen years of spohation and humilia- 
tion thus bore better fruits of learning than the two centuries of 
wealth and honour which have since elapsed. As Brian Walton 
had, at one time, been curate of Allhallows, Bread Street, Milton 
may have known him, and it has been inferred that by Twells's ex- 
pression — '' The Council of State, before whom soi7ie, having rela- 
tion to them, brought this business " — Milton is meant. 

Not with John Hales, Cudworth, Whichcote, Nicholas Bernard, 
Meric Casaubon, nor with any of the men of letters who were 
churchmen, do we find Milton in correspondence. The interest 
of religion was more powerful than the interest of knowledge ; and 
the author of Eikonoklastes must have been held in special abhor- 
rence by the loyal clergy. The general sentiment of this party is 
expressed in Hacket's tirade, for which the reader is referred to 
his Life of Archbisliop Williams. 

From Presbyterians, such as Theophilus Gale or Baxter, Mil- 



84 MILTON. 

ton was equally separated by party. Of Hobbes, Milton's widow 
told Aubrey " that he was not of his acquaintance ; that her hus- 
band did not like him at all, but would acknowledge him to be a 
man of great parts." 

Owing to these circumstances, the circle of Milton's intimates 
contains few, and those undistinguished, names. One exception 
there was. In Andrew Marvel Milton found one congenial spirit, 
incorruptible amid poverty, unbowed by defeat. Marvel was 
twelve years Milton's junior, and a Cambridge man (Trinity), like 
himself. He had had better training still, having been for two 
years an inmate of Nunappleton, in the capacity of instructor to 
Mary, only daughter of the great Lord Fairfax. In 1652, Milton 
had recommended Marvel for the appointment of assistant secre- 
tary to himself, now that he was partially disabled by his blind- 
ness. The recommendation was not effectual at the time, another 
man, Philip Meadows, obtaining the post. It was not till 1657, 
when Meadows was sent on a mission to Denmark, that Marvel 
became Milton's colleague. He remained attached to him to the 
last. It were to be wished that he had left some reminiscences of 
his intercourse with the poet in his later years, some authentic no- 
tice of him in his prose letters, instead of a copy of verses, which 
attest, at once, his affectionate admiration for Milton's great epic, 
and his own little skill in versification. 

Of Marchmont Needham and Samuel Hartlib mention has been 
already made. During the eight years of his sojourn in the house 
in Petty France, " he was frequently visited by persons of quality," 
says Phillips. The only name he gives is Lady Ranelagh. This 
lady, by birth a Boyle, sister of Robert Boyle, had placed first her 
nephew, and then her son, under Milton's tuition. Of an excel- 
lent understanding, and liberally cultivated, she sought Milton's 
society, and as he could not go to visit her, she went to him. There 
are no letters of Milton addressed to her, but he mentions her once 
as "a most superior woman," and when, in 1656, she left London 
for Ireland, he " grieves for the loss of the one acquaintance which 
was worth to him all the rest." These names, with that of Dr. Pa- 
get, exhaust the scanty list of Milton's intimates during this period. 

To these older friends, however, must be added liis former 
pupils, now become men, but remaining ever attached to their old 
tutor, seeing him often when in London, and when absent corre- 
sponding with him. With them he was "affable and instructive 
in conversation." Henry Lawrence, son of the President of 
Oliver's Council, and Cyriac Skinner, grandson of Chief Justice 
Coke, were special favourites. With these he would sometimes 
" by the fire help waste a sullen day ; " and it was these two who 
called forth from him the only utterances of this time which are 
not solemn, serious, or sad. Sonnet xvi. is a poetical invitation to 
Henry Lawrence, " of virtuous father virtuous son," to a " neat re- 
past," not without wine and song, to cheer the winter season. 
Besides these two whose names are familiar o us through the 
%Sonnets, there was Lady Ranelagh 's son, Richard Jones, who went, 



MILTON: 85 

in '.656, to Oxford, attended by his tutor, the German Heinrich 
Oldenburg. We have two letters (Latin) addressed to Jones at 
Oxford, which are curious as showing that Milton was as dissatisfied 
with that university even after the reform, with Oliver Chancellor, 
and Owen Vice-Chancellor, as he had been with Cambridge. 

His two nephews, also his pupils, must have ceased at a very 
early period to be acceptable either as friends or companions. 
They had both — but the younger brother, John, more decidedly 
than Edward — passed into the opposite camp. This is a result of 
the uncle's strict system of Puritan discipline, which will surprise 
no one who has observed that, in education, mind reacts against 
the pressure of will. The teacher who seeks to impose his views 
raises antagonists, and not disciples. The generation of young 
men who grew up under the Commonwealth were in intellectual 
revolt against the constraint of Puritanism before they proceeded 
to political revolution against its authority. Long before the reac- 
tion embodied itself in die political fact of the Restoration, it had 
manifested itself in popular literature. The theatres were still 
closed by the police, but Davenant found a public in London to 
applaud an " entertainment by declamations and music, after the 
manner of the ancients " (1656). The press began timidly to ven- 
ture on books of amusement, in a style of humour which seemed 
ribald and heathenish to the staid and sober covenanter. Some- 
thing of the jollity and merriment of old Elizabethan days seemed 
to be in the air. But with a vast difference. Instead of "dallying 
with the innocence of love," as in England^ s Helicon {\6oo), or 
The Passionate Pilg?-ini, the sentinjent, crushed and maimed by 
unwise repression, found a less honest and less refined expression. 
The strongest and most universal of human passions when allowed 
freedom, light, and air, becomes poetic inspiration. The same 
passion coerced by police is but driven underground. 

So it came to pass that, in these years, the Protector's Council 
of State was much exercised by attempts of the London press to 
supply the public, weary of sermons, with some light literature 
of the class now (1879) known as facetious. On April 25, 1656, 
the august body which had upon its hands the government of 
three kingdoms and the protection of the Protestant interest 
militant throughout Europe, could find nothing better to do than 
to take into consideration a book entitled Sportive Wity o?' the 
Muse's Merriment. Sad to relate, the book was found to con- 
tain " much lascivious and profane matter." And v the editor? — 
no other than John Phillips. Milton's youngest nephew ! It is 
as if nature, in reasserting herself, had made deliberate selection 
of its agent. The pure poet of Conms, the man who had publicly 
boasted his chastity, had trained up a pupil to become the editor 
of an immodest drollery ! Another and more original production 
of John Phillips, the Satyr against Hpy oddites, was an open attack, 
with mixed banter and serious indignation, on the established re- 
ligion. " It affords," says Godwin, " unequivocal indication of the 
company now kept by the author with cavaliers, and bo?i vivansj 



86 MILTON. 

and demireps, and men of ruined fortunes. Edward Phillips, the 
elder brother, followed with the Mysteries of Love and Eloquence 
(165S), a book, according to Godwin, '-entitled to no insignificant 
rank among the multifarious productions issued from the press, to 
debauch the manners of the nation, and to bring back the King." 
Truly, a man's worst vexations come to him from his own relations. 
Milton had the double annoyance of the public exposure before 
the Council of State, and the private reflection on the failure of 
Ws own system of education. 

The homage which was wanting to "the prophet in his own 
C' antry was more liberally tendered by foreigners. Milton, it 
must be remembered, was yet only known in England as the pam- 
phleteer of strong republican, but somewhat eccentric, opinions. 
On the Continent he was the answerer of Salmasius, the vindicator 
of liberty against despotic power. " Learned foreigners of note," 
Phillips tells us, "could not part out of this city without giving a 
visit " to his uncle. Aubrey even exaggerates this flocking of the 
curious, so far as to say that some came over into England only to 
see Oliver Protector and John Milton. That Milton had more 
than he liked of these sight-seers, who came to look at him when 
he could not see them, we can easily believe. Such visitors would 
of course be from Protestant countries. Italians, though admiring 
his elegant Latin, had "disliked him on account of his too severe 
morals." A glimpse, and no more than a glimpse, of the impres- 
sion such visitors could carry away, we obtain in a letter written, 
in 1651, by a Nuremberg pastor, Christopher Arnold, to a friend at 
home : — '• The strenuous defender of the new r^gme, Milton, enters 
readily into conversation ; his speech is pure, his written style 
very pregnant. He has committed himself to a harsh, not to say 
unjust, criticism of the old English divines, and of their Scripture 
commentaries, which are truly learned, be witness the genius of 
learning himself ! " It must not be supposed from this that Milton 
had discoursed with Arnold on the English divines. The allusion 
is to that onfall upon the reformers, Cranmer, Latimer, &c., which 
had escaped from Milton's pen in 1642 to the great grief of his 
friends. If the information of a dissenting minister, one Thomas 
Bradbury, who professed to derive it from Jeremiah White, one of 
Oliver's chaplains, may be trusted, Milton "was allowed by the 
Parliament a weekly table for the entertainment of foreign ministers 
and persons of learning, such especially as came from Protestant 
states, wh'ch allowance was also continued by Cromwell." 

Such homage, though it may be a little tiresome, may have 
gratified for the moment the jDolitical writer, but it would not 
satisfy the poet who was dreaming of an immortality of far other 
fame — 

'* Two equal'd with me in fate, 
So were I equal'd with them in renown." 

And to one with Milton's acute sensibility, yearning for sympathy 
and love, dependent, through his calamity, on the eyes, as on the 



MILTON. 87 

heart, of others, his domestic interior was of more consequence to 
him than outside demonstrations of respect. Four years after the 
death of his first wife he married again. We know nothing more 
of this second wife, Catharine Woodcock, than what may be gath- 
ered from the Sonnet xix, in which he commemorated his "late 
espoused saint," in whose person "love, sweetness, goodness 
shin'd." After only fifteen months' union she died (1658), after 
having given birth to a daughter, who lived only a few months. 
Milton was again alone. 

His pubhc functions as Latin Secretary had been contracted 
within narrow limits by his blindness. The heavier part of the 
duties had been transferred to others, first to Weckherlin, then to 
Philip Meadows, and lastly to Andrew Marvel. The more con- 
fidential diplomacy Thurloe reserved for his own cabinet. But 
Milton continued up to the last to be occasionally called upon for 
a Latin epistle. On September 3, 1658, passed away the master- 
mind which had hitherto compelled the jarring elements in the 
nation to co-exist together, and chaos was let loose. Milton re- 
tained and exercised his secretaryship under Richard Protector, 
and even under the restored Parliament. His latest Latin letter is 
of date May 16, 1659. He is entirely outside all the combinations 
and complications which filled the latter half of that year, after 
Richard's retirement in May. It is little use writing to foreign 
potentates now, for, with one man's life, England has fallen from 
her lead in Europe, and is gravitating towards the Catholic and 
reactionary powers, France and Spain. Milton, though he knows 
nothing more than one of the public, " only what it appears to us 
without doors," he says, will yet write about it. The habit of pam- 
phleteering was on him, and he will write what no one will care to 
read. The stiff-necked commonwealth men, with their doctrinaire 
republicanism, were standing out for their constitutional ideas, blind 
to the fact that the royalists were all the while undermining the 
ground beneath the feet alike of Presbyterian and Independent, 
Parliament and army. The Greeks of Constantinople denouncing 
the Azymite, when Mahmoud II. was forming his lines round the 
doomed city, were not more infatuated than these pedantic com- 
monwealth men with their pariiamentarianism when Charles II. 
was at Calais. 

Not less inopportune than the public men of the party, Milton 
chooses this time for inculcating his views on endowments. A 
fury of utterance was upon him, and he poured out, during the 
death-throes of the repubhc, pamphlet upon pamphlet, as fast as 
he could get them written to his dictation. These extemporised 
effusions betray in their style, hurry and confusion, the restlessness 
of a coming despair. The passionate enthusiasm of the early 
tracts is gone, and all the old faults, the obscurity, the inconsecu- 
tiveness, the want of arrangement, are exaggerated. In the Ready 
Way there is a monster sentence of thirty-nine lines, containing 
336 words. Though his instincts were perturbed, he was unaware 
what turn things were taking. In February, 1660, when all persons 



88 MILTON. 

of ordinary information saw that the restoration of monarchy was 
certain, Milton knew it not, and put out a tract to show his country- 
men a Ready and easy way to established a free Comjuonivealth. 
With the same pertinacity with which he had adhered to his own 
assumption that Morus was author of the Cla;nor, he now refused to 
beheve in the return of the Stuarts. Fast as his pen moved, 
events outstripped it, and he has to rewrite the Ready and easy 
way to suit their march. The second edition is overtaken by the 
Restoration, and it should seem was never circulated. Milton will 
ever " give advice to Sylla," and writes a letter of admonition to 
Monk, which, however, never reached either the press or Sylla. 

The month of May, 1660, put a forced end to his illusion. 
Before the 29th of that month he had fled from the house in Petty 
France, and been sheltered by a friend in the city. In this friend's 
house, in Bartholomew Close, he lay concealed till the passing of 
the Act of Oblivion, 29th August. Phillips says that he owed his 
exemption from the vengeance which overtook so many of his 
friends to Andrew Marvel, " who acted vigorously in his behalf, 
and made a considerable party for him." But in adding that "he 
was so far excepted as not to bear any office in the commonwealth," 
Phillips is in error. Milton's name does not occur in the Act. 
Pope used to tell that Davenant had employed his interest to 
protect a brother-poet, thus returning a similar act of generosity 
done to himself by Milton in 1650." Pope had this story from 
Betterton the actor. How far Davenant exaggerated to Betterton 
his own influence or his exertions, we cannot tell. Another 
account assigns the credit of the intervention to Secretary Morris 
and Sir Thomas Clarges. After all, it is probable that he owed his 
immunity to his insignificance and his harmlessness. The formal- 
ity of burning two of his books by the hands of the hangman was 
gone through". He was also for some time during the autumn of 
1660 in the custody of the serjeant-at-arms, for on 15th December 
there is an entry in the Commons journals ordering his discharge. 
It is characteristic of Milton that, even in this moment of peril, he 
stood up for his rights, and refused to pay an overcharge, which 
the official thought he might safely exact from a rebel and 2 
covenanter. 



MILTON. 89 



THIRD PERIOD. 1660— 1674. 
CHAPTER XII. 

BIOGRAPHICAL. — LITERARY OCCUPATION. — RELIGIOUS OPINIONS. 

Revolutions are of two kinds ; they are either progressive or 
reactionary. A revolution of progress is often destructive, sweep- 
ing away much which should have been preserved. But such a 
revolution has a regenerating force ; it renews the youth of a nation, 
and gives free play to its vital powers. Lost limbs are replaced by 
new. A revolution of reaction, on the other hand, is a benumbing 
influence, paralysing effort, and levelling character. In such a 
conservative revolution the mean, the selfish, and the corrupt come 
to the top ; man seeks ease and enjoyment rather than duty ; virtue, 
honour, patriotism, and disinterestedness disappear altogether 
from a society which has ceased to believe in them. 

The Restoration of 1660 was such a revolution. Complete and 
instantaneous inversion of the position of the two parties in the 
nation, it occasioned much individual hardship. But this was only 
the fortune of war, the necessary consequence of party ascendancy. 
The Restoration was much more than a triumph of the party of the 
royahsts over that of the roundheads; it was the deathblow to 
national aspiration, to all those aims which raise man above him- 
self. It destroyed and trampled under foot his ideal. The Res- 
toration was a moral catastrophe. It was not that there wanted 
good men among the churchmen, men as pious and virtuous as the 
Puritans whom they displaced. But the royalists came back as 
the party of reaction, reaction of the spirit of the world against 
asceticism, of self-indulgence against duty, of materialism against 
idealism. For a time virtue was a public laughing-stock, and the 
word "saint," the highest expression in the language for moral per- 
fection, connoted everything that was ridiculous. I do not speak 
of the gallantries of Whitehall, which figure so prominently in the 
histories of the reign. Far loo much is made of these, when they 
are made the scapegoat of the moralist. The style of court 
manners was, a mere incident on the surface of social life. The 
national life was far more profoundly tainted by the discourage- 
ment of all good men, which penetrated every shire and every 



90 



MILTON. 



parish, than by the distant reports of the loose behaviour of 
Charles II. Servility, meanness, venality, time-serving, and a dis- 
belief in virtue diffused themselves over the nation like a pesti- 
lential miasma, the depressing influence of which was heavy, even 
upon those souls which individually resisted the poison. The 
heroic age of England had passed away, not by gradual decay, by 
imperceptible degeneration, but in a year, in a single day, like the 
winter's snow in Greece. It is for the historian to describe, and 
unfold the sources of this contagion. The biographer of Milton 
has to take note of the political change only as it affected the 
worldly circumstances of the man, the spiritual environment of the 
poet, and the springs of his inspiration. 

The consequences of the Restoration to Milton's worldly for- 
tunes were disastrous. As a partisan he was necessarily involved 
in the ruin of his party. As a matter of course, he lost his Latin 
secretaryship. There is a story that he was offered to be con- 
tinued in it, and that when urged to accept the offer by his wife, he 
replied, "Thou art in the right; you, as other women, would ride 
in your coach; for me, my aim is to live and die an honest man." 
This tradition, handed on by Pope, is of doubtful authenticity. It 
is not probable that the man who had printed of Charles I. what 
Milton had printed, could have been offered office under Charles 
II. Even were court favour to be purchased by concessions, Mil- 
ton was not the man to make them, or to belie his own anteced- 
ents, as Marchmont Need ham, Dr37den, and so many others did. 
Our wish for Milton is that he should have placed himself from 
the beginning above party. But he had chosen to be the champion 
of a party, and he loyally accepted the consequences. He escaped 
with life and hberty. The reaction was not bloodthirsty. Milton 
was already punished by the loss of his sight, and he was now 
mulcted in three-fourths of his small fortune. A sum of 2000/. 
which he had placed in government securities was lost, the restored 
monarchy refusing to recognise the obligations of the protectorate. 
He lost another hke sum by mismanagement, and for want of good 
advice, says Phillips, or, according to his granddaughter's state- 
ment, by the dishonesty of a money-scrivener. He had also to 
give up, without compensation, some property, valued at 60/. a 
year, which he had purchased when the estates of the Chapter of 
Westminster were sold. In the great fire, 1666, his house in 
Bread Street was destroyed. Thus, from easy circumstances, he 
was reduced, if not to destitution, at least to narrow means. He 
left at his death 1500/., which Phillips calls a considerable sum. 
And if he sold his books, one by one, during his lifetime, this was 
because, knowing their value, he thought he could dispose of them 
to greater advantage than his wife would be able to do. 

But far outweighing such considerations as pecuniary ruin and 
personal discomfort, was the shock which the moral nature felt 
from the irretrievable discomfiture of all the hopes, aims, and aspir- 
ations which had hitherto sustained and nourished his soul. In a 
few months the labour of twenty years was swept away without a 



MIL TON. 



9' 



trace of it being left. It was not merely a political defeat of his 
party, it was the total wreck of the principles of the social and 
rehgious ideal, with which Milton's life was bound up. Others, 
whose convictions only had been engaged in the cause, could 
hasten to accommodate themselves to the new era, or even to 
transfer their services to the conqueror. But such flighty allegi- 
ance was not possible for Milton, who had embarked in the Puritan 
cause not only intellectual convictions, but all the generosity and 
ardour of his passionate nature. " I conceive myself to be," he 
had written in 1642, "not as mine own person, but as a member 
incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded, and whereof 
I had declared myself openly to be the partaker." It was now in 
the moment of overthrow that Milton became truly great. " Wan- 
dellos im ewigen Ruin," he stood alone, and became the party 
himself. He took the only course open to him, turned away his 
thoughts from the political disaster, and directed the fierce en- 
thusiasm which burned within upon an absorbing poetic task. His 
outward hopes were blasted, and he returned with concentrated 
ardour to woo the muse, from whom he had so long truanted. The 
passion which seethes beneath the stately march of the verse in 
Paradise Lost, is not the hopeless moan of desjDair, but the in- 
tensified fanaticism which defies misfortune to make it " bate one 
jot of heart or hope." The grand loneliness of Milton after 1668, 
" is reflected in his three great poems by a sublime independence 
of human sympathy like that with which mountains fascinate and 
rebuff us." 

Late then, but not too late, Milton, at the age of fifty-two, fell 
back upon the rich resources of his own mind, upon poetical com- 
position, and the study of good books, which he always asserted 
to be necessary to nourish and sustain a poet's imagination. Here 
he had to contend with the enormous difficulty of blindness. He 
engaged a kind of attendant to read to him. But this only sufficed 
for English books — imperfectly even for these — and the greater 
part of the choice, not extensive, library upon v.'hich Milton drew, 
was Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and the modern languages of Europe. 
In a letter to Heimbach, of date 1666, he complains pathetically of 
the misery of having to spell out, letter by letter, the Latin words 
of the epistle to the attendant who was writing to his dictation. At 
last he fell upon the plan of engaging young friends, who occasion- 
ally visited him, to read to him and to write for him. In the preci- 
ous volume of Milton MSS. preserved in the library of Trinity 
College, Cambridge, six different hands have been distinguished. 
Who they were is not always known. But Phillips "tell us that "he 
had daily about him one or other to read to him ; some persons of 
man's estate, who of their own accord greedily catch 'd at the op- 
portunity of being his reader, that they might as well reap the 
benefit of what they read to him, as oblige him by the benefit of their 
reading ; others of younger years sent by their parents to the same 
end." Edward Phillips himself, who visited his uncle to the last, 
may have been among the number, as much as his own engage* 



92 



MIL TON. 



ments as tutor, first to the only son of John Evelyn, then in the 
family of the Earl of Pembroke, and finally to the Bennets, Lord 
Arlington's children, would permit him. Others of these casual 
readers were Samuel Barrow, body physician to Charles IL, and 
Cyriac Skinner, of whom mention has been already made (above, 

p. 84). 

To a blind man, left with three little girls, of whom the youngest 
was only eight at the Restoration, marriage seemed equally neces- 
sary for their sake as for his own, Milton consulted his judicious 
friend and medical adviser. Dr. Paget, who recommended to him 
Elizabeth Minshull, of a family of respectable position near Nant- 
wich, in Cheshire. She was some distant relation of Paget, who 
must have felt the terrible responsibility of undertaking to recom- 
mend. She justified his selection. The marriage took place in 
February, 1663, and during the remaining eleven years of his life 
the poet was surrounded by the thoughtful attentions of an active 
and capable woman. There is but scanty evidence as to what she 
was like, either in person or character. Aubrey, who knew her, 
says she was " a gent. (? genteel) person, (of) a peaceful and agree- 
able humour." Newton, Bishop of Bristol, who wrote in 1749, had 
heard that she was " a woman of most violent spirit, and a hard 
mother-in-law to his children." It is certain that she regarded 
her husband with great veneration, and studied his comfort. Mary 
Fisher, a maid-servant in the house, deposed that at the end of his 
life, when he was sick and infirm, his wife having provided some- 
thing for dinner she thought he would like, he " spake to his said 
wife these or like words, as near as this deponent can remember: 
' God have mercy, Betty, I see thou wilt perform according to thy 
promise, in providing me such dishes as I think fit while I live, and 
when I die thou knowest I have left thee all." There is no evi- 
dence that his wife rendered him literary assistance. . Perhaps, as 
she looked so thoroughly to his material comfort, her function was 
held, by tacit agreement, to end there. 

As casual visitors, or volunteer readers, were not always in the 
way, and a hired servant who could not spell Latin was of very 
restricted use, it was not unnatural that Milton should look to his 
daughters, as they grew up, to take a share in supplying his 
voracious demand for intellectual food. Anne, the eldest, though 
she had handsome features, was deformed and had an impediment 
in her speech, which made her unavailable as a reader. The other 
two, Mary and Deborah, might now have been of inestimable 
service to their father had their dispositions led them to adapt them- 
selves to his needs, and the circumstances of the house. Unfortu- 
nate it was for Milton that his biblical views on the inferiority of 
women had been reduced to practice in the bringing up of his own 
daughters. It cannot, indeed, be said that the poet whose imagi- 
nation created the Eve of Paradise Lost regarded woman as the 
l^ousehold drudge, existing only to minister to man's wants. Of 
ail that men have said of women, nothing is more loftily conceived 
then the well-known passage at tlte end of Book viii. ; 



MIL TON. g3 

" Wlien T approach 
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems, 
And in herself complete, so well to know 
Her own, that what she wills to do or say 
Seems wisest, virtuest, discreetest, best ; 
All higher knowledge in her presence falls 
Degraded; wisdom in discourse with her 
Loses discountenanc'd, and like folly shows ; 
Authority and reason on her wait. 
As one intended first, not after made 
Occasionally; and, to consummate all, 
Greatness of mind, and nobleness, their seat 
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe 
About her, as a guard angelic plac'd." 

Bishop Newton thought that, in drawing Eve, Milton had in 
mind his third wife, because she had hair of the colour of Eve's 
"golden tresses." But Milton had never seen Elizabeth Minshull. 
If reality suggested any trait, physical or mental, of the Eve, it 
would certainly have been some woman seen in earlier years. 

But \vherever Milton may have met with an incarnation of 
female divinity such as he has drawn, it was not in his own family. 
We cannot but ask, how is it that one, whose type of woman is the 
loftiest known to English literature, should have brought up his 
own daughters on so different a model ? Milton is not one of the 
false prophets, who turn round and laugh at their own enthusiasms, 
who say one thing in their verses, and another thing over their 
cups. What he writes in his poetry is what he thinks, what he 
means, and what he will do. But in directing the bringing up of 
his daughters, he puts his own typical woman entirely on one side. 
His practice is framed on the principle that 

" Nothing lovelier can be found 
In woman, than to study household good." 

Paradise Losf, ix. 233. 

He did not allow his daughters to learn any language, saying 
with a gibe that one tongue was enough for a woman. They were 
not sent to any school, but had some sort of teaching at home from 
a mistress. But in order to make them useful in reading to him, 
their father was at the pains to train them to read aloud in five or 
six languages, of none of which they understood one word. When 
we think of the time and labour which must have been expended 
to teach them to do this, it must occur to us that a little more 
labour would have sufficed to teach them so much of one or two of 
the languages as would have made their reading a source of inter- 
est and improvement to tliemselves. This Milton refused to do. 
The consequence was, as might have been expected, the occupation 
became so irksome to them that they rebelled against it. In the 
case of one of them, Mary, who was like her mother in' person, and 
took after her in other respects, this restiveness passed into open 



94 MILTON. 

revolt. She first resisted, then neglected, and finally came to hate, 
her father. When some one spoke in her presence' of her father's 
approaching marriage, she said, " tliat was no news to her ol his 
wedding; but if she could hear of his death, that was something." 
She combined with Anne, the eldest daughter, "to counsel his 
maid-servant to cheat him in his markethigs." They sold his 
books without his knowledge. " They made nothing of deserting 
him," he was often heard to complain. They continued to live 
with him five or six years after his marriage. But at last the situ- 
ation became intolerable to both parties, and they were sent out to 
learn embroidery in gold or silver, as a means of obtaining their 
livelihood. Deborah, the youngest, was included in the same 
arrangement, though she seems to have been more helpful to her 
father, and to have been at one time his principal reader. Aubrey 
says that he "taught -her Latin, and that she was his amanuensis." 
She even spoke of him when she was old — she lived to be seventy- 
four — with some tenderness. She was once, in 1725, shewn 
Faithorne's crayon drawing of the poet, witliout being told for 
whom it was intended. She immediately exclaimed, " O Lord ! 
that is the picture of my father ! " and stroking down the hair of 
her forehead, added, "Just so my father wore his hair." 

One of Milton's volunteer readers, and one to whom we owe 
the most authentic account of him in his last years, was a young 
Quaker, named Thomas Ellwood. Milton's Puritanism had been 
all his life slowly gravitating in the direction of more liberty, and 
though he would not attach himself to any sect, he must have felt in 
no remote sympathy with men who repudiated state interference in 
religious matters and disdained ordinances. Some such sympathy 
with the pure spirituahty of the Quaker may have disposed Milton 
favourably towards Ellwood. The acquaintance once begun, was 
cemented by mutual advantage. Milton, besides securing an in- 
telligent reader, had a pleasure in teaching; and Ellwood, though 
the reverse of humble, was teachable from desire to expand him- 
self. Ellwood took a lodging near the poet, and went to him every 
day, except "first-day," in the afternoon, to read Latin to him. 

Milton's frequent change of abode has been thought indicative 
of a restless temperament, seeking escape from petty miseries by 
change of scene. On emerging from hiding, or escaping from the 
serjeant-at-arms in 1660, he lived for a short time in Holborn, near 
Red Lion Square. From this he removed to Jewin Street, and 
moved again, on his marriage, in 1662, to the house of Millington, 
the bookseller, who was now beginning business, but who, before 
his death in 1704, had accumulated the largest stock of second- 
hand books to be found in London. His last remove was to a 
house in a newly-created row facing the Artiller3'-ground, on the 
site of the west side of what is now called Bunhill Row. This was 
his abode from his marriage till his death, nearly twelve years, a 
longer stay than he had made in any other residence. This is the 
house which must be associated with the poet of Paradise Lost, as 
it was here that the poem was in part written, and wholly revised 



MILTON. 



95 



and finished. But the Bunhill Row house is only producible by the 
imagination ; every trace of it has long been swept away, though 
the name Milton Street, bestowed upon a neighbouring street, pre- 
serves the remembrance of the poet's connexion with the locality. 
Here '• an ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire, Dn Wright, found 
John Milton in a small chamber, hung with rusty green, sitting. in 
an elbow-chair, and dressed neatly in black ; pale, but not cadav- 
erous, his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones." At 
the door of this house, sitting in the sun, looking out upon the Ar- 
tillery-ground, " in a grey, coarse cloth coat," he would receive his 
visitors. On colder days he would walk for hours — three or four 
hours at a time — in his garden. A garden was 2^. sine qua non, a.nd 
he took care to have one to every house he lived in. 

His habit in early life had been to study late into the night. 
After he lost his sight, he changed his hours, and retired to rest at 
nine. In summer he rose at four, in winter at five, and began the 
day with having the Hebrew Scriptures read to him. " Then he 
cont(nnplated. At seven his man came to him again, and then 
read to him and wrote till dinner. The writing was as much as 
the reading " (Aubrey). Then he took exercise, either walking in 
the garden, or swinging in a machine. His only recreation, besides 
conversation, was music. He played the organ and the bass-viol, 
the organ most. Sometimes he would sing himself, or get his wife 
to sing to him, though she had, he said, no ear, yet a good voice. 
Then'he went up to his study to be read to till six. After six his 
friends were admitted to visit him, and would sit with him till 
eight. At eight he went down to supper, usually olives or some 
light thing. He was very abstemious in his diet, having to con- 
tend with a gouty diathesis. He was not fastidious in hFs choice 
of meats, but content with anything that was in season, or easy to 
be procured. After supping thus sparingly, he smoked a pipe of 
tobacco, drank a glass of water, and then retired to bed. He was 
sparing in his use of wine. His Samson, who in this as in other 
things, is Milton himself, allays his thirst " from the clear milky 
juice." 

Bed, with its warmth and recumbent posture, he found favour- 
able to composition. At other times he would compose or prune 
his verses, as he walked in the garden, and then, coming in, dictate. 
His verse was not at the conimand of his will. Sometimes he 
would lay awake the whole night, trying but unable to make a sin- 
gle line. At other times lines flowed without premeditation, " with 
a certain impetus and asstro." His vein, he said, flowed only from 
tlie" vernal to the autumnal equinox. Phillips here transposes the 
seasons, though he has preserved the authentic fact of intermittent 
inspiration. It was the spring which restored to Milton, as it has 
to other poets, the buoyancy necessary to composition. What he 
composed at night, he dictated in the day, sitting obliquely in an 
elbow-chair, with his leg thrown over the arm. He would dictate 
forty lines, as it were in a breath, and then reduce them to half 
the number. 



g6 MILTON. . 

Milton's piety is admitted, even by his enemies ; and it is a 
piety which oppresses his writings as well as his h'fe. The fact 
that a man, with a deep sense of rehgion, should not have attended 
any place of pubhc worship, has given great trouble to Milton's 
biographers. And the principal biographers of this thorough- 
going non-conformist have been Anglican clergymen ; Bishop 
Newton, Todd, Mitford ; Dr. Johnson, more clerical than any 
cleric, being no exception. Mitford would give Milton a dispensa- 
tion on the score of his age and infirmities. But the cause lay 
deeper. A profound apprehension of the spiritual world leads to a 
disregard of rites. To a mind so disposed externals become, first 
indifferent, then impediment. Ministration is officious intrusion. 
I do not find that Milton, though he wrote against paid ministers 
as hirelings, ever expressly formulated an opinion against ministers 
as such. But as has already been hinted, there grew up in him, in 
the last period of his life, a secret sympathy with the mode of 
thinking which came to characterise the Quaker sect. Not that 
Milton adopted any of their peculiar fancies. He affirms categori- 
cally the permissibility of oaths, of military service, and requires 
that women should keep silence in the congregation. But in neg- 
ativing all means of arriving at truth except the letter of Scripture 
interpreted by the inner light, he stood upon the same platform as 
the followers of George Fox. 

Milton's latest utterance on theological topics is found in a 
tract published by him in the year before his death, 1673. The 
piece is entitled Of true religion, heresy, schism, ioleratioii j but 
its meagre contents do not'bear out the compressiveness of the 
title. The only matter really discussed in the pages of the tract is 
the limit of toleration. The stamp of age is upon the style, which 
is more careless and incoherent even than usual. He has here dic- 
tated his extempore thoughts, without premeditation or revision, so 
that we have here a record of Milton's habitual mind. Having 
watched him gradually emancipating himself from the contracted 
Calvinistic mould of the Bread Street home, it is disappointing to 
find that, at sixty-five, his development has proceeded no further 
than we here find him. He is now willing to extend toleration to 
all sects who make the Scriptures their sole rule of faith. Sects 
may misunderstand Scripture, but to err is the condition of human- 
it)-, and will be pardoned by God, if diligence, prayer, and sincerity 
have been used. The sects named as to be tolerated are— Luther- 
ans, Calvinists, Anabaptists. Arians, Socinians, Arminians. They 
are to be tolerated to the extent of being allowed, on all occasions, 
to give account of their faith, by arguing, preaching in their several 
assemblies, writing and p:inting. 

This tract alone is sufficient refutation of an idle story that 
Milton died a Roman Catholic. It is not well vouched, being hear- 
say three times removed. Milton's younger brother, Sir Christopher, 
is said to have said so at a dinner entertainment. If he ever did 
say as much, it must be set down to that peculiar form of credulity 
which makes perverts think that every one is about to follow their 



MILTON. gy 

example. In Christopher Milton, " a man of no parts or ability, 
and a superstitious nature " (Toland), such credulity found a con- 

lial soil. 

In this pamphlet the principle of toleration is Hatly enunciated 
in opposition to the practice of the Restoration. But the principle 
is rested not on the statesman's ground of the irrelevancy of 
religious dispute to good government, but on the theological ground 
of the venial nature of religious error. And to permissible error 
there are very narrow limits ; limits which exclude Catholics. For 
Milton will exclude Romanists from toleration, not on the states- 
man's ground of incivism, but on the theologian's ground of idol- 
atry. All his antagonism in this tract is reserved for the Catholics. 
There is not a hint of discontent with the prelatry, once intolerable 
to him. Yet that prelatry was now scourging tlie non-conformists 
with scorpions instead of with whips, with its Act of Uniformity, 
its Conventicle Act, its Five-mile Act, filling the gaols with Milton's 
own friends and fellow-religionists. Several times, in these thirteen 
pages, he appeals to the practice or belief of the Church of England, 
once even calling it " our church." 

This tract on toleration was Milton's latest published work. 
But he was preparing for the press, at the time of his death, a 
more elaborate theological treatise. Daniel Skinner, a nephew of 
his old friend Cyriac, was serving as Milton's amanuensis in writing 
out a fair copy. Death came before a third of the work of correc- 
tion had been completed, 196 pages out of 735, of which the whole 
rough draft consists. The whole remained in Daniel Skinner's 
hands in 1674. Milton, though in his preface he is aware that his 
pages contain not a little which will be unpalatable to the reigning 
opinion in religion, would have dared publication, if he could have 
passed the censor. But Daniel Skinner, who v/as a Fellow of 
Trinity, and had a career before him, was not equally free. What 
could not appear in London, however, might be printed at Am- 
sterdam. Skinner, accordingly, put both the theological treatise, 
and the epistles written by the Latin Secretary, into the hands of 
Daniel Elzevir. The English government getting intelligence of 
the proposed pubhcation of the foreign correspondence of the 
Parliament and the Protector, interfered, and pressure was put 
upon wSkinner, through the Master of Trinity, Isaac Barrow. 
Skinner hastened to save himself from the fate which in 1681 befel 
Locke, and gave up to the Secretary of State not only the Latin 
letters, but the MS. of the theological treatise. Nothing further 
was known as to the fate of the MS. till 1823, when it was disin- 
terred from one of the presses of the old State Paper Office. The 
Secretary of State, Sir Joseph Williamson, when he retired from 
office in 1678, instead of carrying away his correspondence as had 
been the custom, left it behind him. Thus it was that the T7'eatise 
of C/ij'istian Doctrine first saw light one hundred and fifty years 
after the author's death. 

In a work which had been written as a text-book for the use of 
earners, there can be little scope for originality. And Milton 



^8 MILTON. 

follows the division of the matter into heads usual in the manuals 
then current. But it was impossible for Milton to handle the dry 
bones of a divinity compendium without stirring them into life. 
And divinity which is made to live necessarily becomes unor- 
thodox. 

The usual method of the school text-books of the seventeenth 
century was to exhibit dogma in the artificial terminology of the 
controversies of the sixteenth century. For this procedure Milton 
substitutes the words of Scripture simpl3% The traditional terms 
of the text-books are retained, but they are employed only as heads 
under which to arrange the words of Scripture. This process, 
which in other hands would be little better than index making, 
becomes here pregnant with meaning. The originality which he 
voluntarily resigns, in employing only the words of the Bible, he 
recovers by his freedom of exposition. He shakes himself loose 
from the trammels of traditional exposition, and looks at the text 
for himself. The truth was 

" Left only in those written records pure, 
Though not but by the spirit understood." 

Paradise Lost xii. 510. 

Upon the points which interested him most closely, Milton knew 
that his understanding of the text differed from the standard of 
Protestant orthodoxy. That God created matter, not out of 
nothing, but out of Himself, and that death is, in the course of 
nature, total extinction of being, though not opinions received, 
were not singular. More startling is his assertion that polygamy 
is not, in itself, contrary to morality, though it may be inexpedient. 
More offensive to the religious sentiment of his day would have 
been his vigorous vindication of the free-will of man against the 
reigning Calvinism, and his assertion of the inferiority of the Son 
in opposition to the received Athanasianism. He labours this 
point of the nature of God with especial care, showing how greatly 
it occupied his thoughts. He arranges his texts so as to exhibit 
in Scriptural language the semi-Arian scheme, i.e.., a scheme which, 
admitting the co-essentiality, denies the eternal generation. 
Through all this manipulation of texts we seem to see that Milton 
is not the school logician erecting a consistent fabric of words, but 
that he is dominated by an imagination peopled with concrete per- 
sonalities, and labouring to assign their places to the Father and 
Son as separate agents in the mundane drama. The De Doctrma 
Christiana is the prose counterpart of Paradise Lost and Re- 
gained, a caput mortuum of the poems, with every ethereal particle 
evaporated. 

In the royal injunctions of 1614, James I. had ordered students 
in the universities not to insist too long upon compendiums, but to 
study the Scriptures, and to bestow their time upon the fathers 
and councils. In his attempt to express dogmatic theology in the 
words of Scripture, Milton was unwittingly obeying this injunction. 
The other part of the royal direction as to fathers and councils it 



MILTON. 99 

was not in Milton's plan to carry out. Neither, indeed, was it in 
his power. He had not the necessary learning. M. Scherer says 
that Milton "laid all antiquity, sacred and profane, under contri- 
bution." So far is this from being the case, that while he exhibits, 
in this treatise, an intimate knowledge of the text of the canonical 
books, Hebrew and Greek, there is an absence of that average 
acquaintance with Christian antiquity which formed the profes- 
sional outfit of the episcopal divine. Milton's references to the 
fathers are perfunctory and second-hand. The only citation of 
Chrysostom, for instance, which I have noticed is in these words : 
" the same is said to be the opinion of Chrysostom, Luther, and 
other moderns." He did not esteem the judgment of the fathers 
sufficiently to deem them worth studying. In the interpretation of 
texts, as in other matters of opinion, Milton withdrew within the 
fortress of his absolute personality. 

I have now to relate the external history of the composition of 
Paradise Lost. When Milton had to skulk for a time in 1660, he 
was already in steady work upon the poem. Though a few lines 
of it were composed as early as 1642, it was not till 1658 that he took 
up the task of composition continuously. If we may trust our only 
authority (Aubrey-Phillips), he had finished it in 1663, about the 
time of his marriage. In polishing, rewriting, and writing out fair, 
much might remain to be done, after the poem was, in a way, fin- 
ished. It is in 1665 that we first make acquaintance with Paradise 
Lost in a complete state. This was the year of the plague, known 
in our annals as the Great Plague, to distinguish its desolating 
ravages from former slighter visitations of the epidemic. Every 
one who could fled from the city of destruction. Milton applied 
to his young friend EUwood to find him a shelter. Ellwood, who 
was then living as tutor in the house of the Penningtons, took a 
cottage for Milton in their neighbourhood, at Chalfont St. Giles, in 
the county of Bucks. Not only the Penningtons, but General Fleet- 
wood had also his residence near this village ; and a report is men- 
tioned by Howitt that it was Fleetwood who provided the ex-secre- 
tary with a refuge. The society of neither of these friends was 
available for Milton. For Fleetwood was a sentenced regicide ; 
and in July Pennington and Ellwood were hurried off to Aylesbury 
gaol by an indefatigable justice of the peace, who was desirous of 
giving evidence of his zeal for the king's government. That the 
Chalfont cottage " was not pleasantly situated," must have been 
indifferent to the blind old man, as much so as that the immediate 
neighbourhood, with its heaths and wooded uplands, reproduced 
the scenery he had loved when he wrote D Allegro. 

As soon as Ellwood was relieved from imprisonment, he re- 
turned to Chalfont. Then it was that Milton put into his hands the 
completed Paradise Lost, " bidding me take it home with me, and 
read it at my leisure, and when I had so done, return it to him with 
my judgment thereupon." On returning it, besides giving the 
author the benefit of his judgment — a judgment not preserved, and 



loo MILTON. 

not indispensable — the Quaker made his famous speech, " Thou 
hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of 
Paradise found ? " Milton afterwards told Ellwood that to this 
casual question was due his writing Paradise Regained. The later 
poem was included in the original conception, if not in the scheme 
of the first epic. But we do get from Ellwood's reminiscence a 
date for the beginning of Paradise Regained^ which must have 
been at Chalfont in the autumn of 1665. 

When the plague was abated, and the city had become safely 
habitable, Milton returned to Artillery Row. He had not been 
long back when London was devastated by a fresh calamity, only 
less terrible than the plague, because it destroyed the home, and not 
the life. The Great Fire succeeded the Great Plague. Two-thirds 
of the city, 13,000 houses, were reduced to ashes, and the whole 
current of life and business entirely suspended. Through these 
two overwhelming disasters Milton must have been supporting his 
solitary spirit by writing Paradise Regained., Samson Agonistes, 
and giving the final touches to Paradise Lost. He was now so 
wholly unmoved by his environment, that we look in vain in the 
poems for any traces of this season of suffering and disaster. The 
past and his own meditations were now all in all to him ; the 
horrors of the present were as nothing to a man who had outlived 
his hopes. Plague and fire, what were they, after the ruin of the 
noblest of causes ? The stoical compression of Paradise Regained 
is in perfect keeping with the fact that it was in the middle of the 
ruins of London that Milton placed his poem in the hands of the 
licenser. 

For licenser there was now, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to 
wit, for religious literature. Of course, the Primate read by deputy, 
usually one of his chaplains. The reader into whose hands Para- 
dise Lost came, though an Oxford man, and a cleric on his prefer- 
ment, who had written his pamphlet against the dissenters, hap- 
pened to be one whose antecedents, as Fellow of All Souls, and 
Proctor (in 1663), ensured his taking a less pedantic and bigoted 
view of his duties. Still, though Dryden's dirty plays would have 
encountered no objection before such a tribunal, the same facilities 
were not likely to be accorded to anything which bore the name of 
John Milton, secretary to Oliver, and himself an austere republican. 
Tomkyns — that was the young chaplain's name — did stumble at a 
phrase in Book i. 598, 

" With fear of change 
Perplexes monarchs." 

There had been in England, and were to be again, times when 
men had hanged for less than this. Tomkyns, who was sailing on 
the smooth sea of preferment with a fair wind, did not wish to get 
into trouble, but at last he let the book pass. Perhaps he thought 
it was only religious verse written for the sectaries, which would 
never be heard of at court, or among the wits, and that therefore it 
was of little consequence what it contained. 



MILTON. 101 

A publisher was found, notwithstanding that Paul's, or as it 
now was, St. Paul's, Churchyard had ceased to exist, in Aldersgate, 
which lay outside the circuit of the conflagration. The agreement, 
still preserved in the National Museum, between the author, "John 
Milton, gent, of the one parte, and Samuel Symons, printer, of the 
other parte," is among the curiosities of our hterary history. The 
curiosity consists not so much in the illustrious name appended 
(not in autograph) to the deed, as in the contrast between the pres- 
ent fame of the book, and the waste-paper price at which the copy- 
right is being valued. The author received 5/. down ; was to 
receive a second 5/. when the first edition should be sold ; a third 
5/. when the second ; a fourth 5/. when the third edition should be 
gone. Milton lived to receive the second 5/., and no more — 10/. 
in all, for Paradise Lost. I cannot bring myself to join in the 
lamentations of the biographers over this bargain. Surely it is 
better so ; better to know that the noblest monument of English 
letters had no money value, than to think of it as having been paid 
for at a pound the line. 

The agreement with Symons is dated 27th April, the entry in 
the register of Stationers' Hall is 20th August. It was, therefore, 
in the autumn of 1667 that Paradise Lost was in the hands of the 
public. We have no data for the time occupied in the composition 
of Paradise Kegaimd and Samson Agonistes. We have seen that 
the former poem was begun at Chalfont in 1665, and it may be 
conjecturally stated that Samson was finished before September, 
1667. At any rate, both the poems were published togetlier in the 
autumn of 1670. 

Milton had four years more of life granted him after this publi- 
cation. But he wrote no more poetry. It was as if te had ex- 
hausted his strength in a last effort, in the Promethean agony of 
Samson, and knew that his hour of inspiration was passed away. 
But, like all men who have once tasted the joys and pangs of com- 
position, he could not now do without its excitement. The occu- 
pation, and the indispensable solace of the last ten sad years, had 
been his poems. He would not write more verse, when the asstrus 
was not on him, but he must write. He took up all the dropped 
threads of past years, ambitious plans formed in the fulness of 
vigour, and laid aside, but not abandoned. He was tlmi very oppo- 
site of Shelley, who could never look at a piece of his own compo- 
sition a second time, but when he had thrown it off at a heat, 
rushed into something else. Milton's adhesiveness was such that 
he could never give up a design once entered upon. In these four 
years, as if conscious that his time was now nearly out, he laboured 
to complete five such early undertakings. 

(i.) Of his Compendinm of Theology I have already spoken. 
He was overtaken by death while preparing this for the press. 

(2.) His Plistory of Britian must have cost him much labour, 
bestowed upon comparison of the conflicting authorities. It is the 
record of the studies he had made for his abandoned epic poem, 
and is evidence how much the subject occupied his mind. 



I02 MILTON. 

The History of B7'itai7i, 1670, had been preceded by (3) a Latin 
grammar, in 1669, and was followed by (4) a Logic on the method of 
Ramus, 1672. 

In 1673 h^ brought out a new edition of his early volume of 
Poems. In this volume he printed for the first time the sonnets, 
and other pieces, which had been written in the interval of twenty- 
seven 3'ears since the date of his first edition. Not, indeed, all the 
sonnets which we now have. Four — in which Fairfax, Vane, Crom- 
well, and the Commonwealth are spoken of as Milton would speak 
of them — were necessarily kept back, and not put into print till 
1694, by Phillips, at the end of his life of his uncle. 

In proportion to the trouble which Milton's words cost him, 
was his care in preserving them. His few Latin letters to his 
foreign friends are remarkably barren either of fact or sentiment. 
But Milton liked them well enough to have kept copies of them, 
and now allowed a publisher, Brabazon Aylmer, to issue them in 
print, adding to them, with a view to make out a volume, his college 
exercises, which he had also preserved. 

Among the papers which he left at his death, were the begin- 
nings of two undertakings, either of them of overwhelming magni- 
tude, which he did not live to complete. We have seen that he 
taught his pupils geography out of Davity, Description de VUnivers. 
He was not satisfied with this, or with any existing compendium. 
They were all dry ; exact enough with their latitudes and longitudes, 
but omitted such uninteresting stuff as manners, government, re- 
ligion, &c. Milton would essay a better system. All he had ever 
executed was Russia, taking the pains to turn over and extract for 
his purpose all the best travels in that country. This is the frag- 
ment which figures in his Works as a Brief Histo?y of Miiscovia. 

The hackneyed metaphor of Pegasus harnessed to a luggage 
trolley will recur to us when we think of the author of U Allegro 
setting himself to compile a Latin lexicon. If there is any literary 
drudgery more mechanical than another, it is generally supposed 
to be that of making a dictionary. Nor had he taken to this in- 
dustry as a resource in age, when the genial flow of invention had 
dried up, and original composition had ceased to be in his power. 
The three folio volumes of MS.whicli Milton left were the work of 
his youth ; it was a work .which the loss of eyesight of necessity 
put an end to. It is not Milton only, but all students who read 
with an alert mind, reading to grow, and not to remember, who 
have felt the want of an occupation which shall fill those hours 
when mental vigilance is impossible, and vacuity unendurable. 
Index-making or cataloguing has been the resource of many in such 
hours. But it was not, I think, as a mere shifting of mental posture 
that Milton undertook to rewrite Robert Stephens ; it was as part of 
his language training. Only by diligent practice and incessant ex- 
ercise of attention and care, could Milton have educated his suscep- 
tibility to the specific power of words, to the nicety which he at- 
tained beyond any other of our poets. Part of this education is 
recorded in the seemingly withered leaves of his Latin Thesaurus, 



MILTON. 103 

though the larger part must have been achieved, not by a reflective 
and critical collection of examples, but by a vital and impassioned 
reading. 

Milton's complaint was what the profession of that day called 
gout. '' He would be very cheerful even in his gout fits, and sing," 
says Aubrey. This gout returned again and again, and by these 
repeated attacks wore out his resisting power. He died of the 
" gout struck in," on Sunday, 8th November, 1674, and was buried, 
near his father, in the chancel of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. The 
funeral was attended, Toland says, "by all his learned and great 
friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the vulgar." 
The disgusting profanation of the leaden coffin, and dispersion of 
the poet's bones by the parochial authorities, during the repair of 
the church in August, 1790, has been denied, but it is to be feared 
that the fact is too true. 



I04 MILTON, 



CHAPTER XIII. 

PARADISE LOST — PARADISE REGAINED — SAMSON AGONISTES. 

" Many men of forty," it has been said, " are dead poets ; " and 
it might seem that Milton, Latin secretary, and party pamphleteer, 
had died to poetry about the fatal age. In 1645 when he made a 
gathering of his early pieces for the volume published by Hum- 
phry Moseley, he wanted three years of forty. That volume con- 
tained, besides other things, Cofnns, Lycidas, VAllgero, and // 
Peiiseroso ; then, when produced, as they remain to this day, the 
finest flower of English poesy. But, though thus hke a wary hus- 
bandman, garnering his sheaves in presence of the threatening 
storm, Milton had no intention of bidding farewell to poetry. On 
the contrary, he regarded this volume only as first-fruits, an 
earnest of greater things to come. 

The ruling idea of Milton's hfe, and the key to his mental his- 
tory, is his resolve to produce a great poem. Not that the aspira- 
tion in itself is singular, for it is probably shared by every young 
poet in his turn. As every clever school-boy is destined by him- 
self or his friends to become Lord Chancellor, and every private in 
the French army carries in his haversack the baton of a marshal, 
so it is a necessary ingredient of the dream on Parnassus, that it 
should embody itself in a form of surpassing brilliance. What 
distinguishes Milton from the crowd of young ambition, " audax 
juventa," is the constancy of resolve. He not only nourished 
through manhood the dream of youth, keeping under the importu- 
nate instincts which carry off most ambitions in middle hfe into the 
pursuit of place, profit, honour — the thorns which spring up and 
smother the wheat — but carried out his dream in its integrity in old 
age. He formed himself for this achievement, and for no other. 
Study at home, travel abroad, the arena of political controversy, 
the public service, the practice of the domestic virtues, were so 
many parts of the schooling which was to make a poet. 

The reader who has traced with me thus far the course of 
Milton's mental development will perhaps be ready to beHeve that 
this idea had taken entire possession of his mind from a very early 
age. The earliest written record of it is of date 1632, in Sonnet 
II. This was written as early as the poet's twenty-third year; and 
in these lines the resolve is uttered, not as then just conceived, 



MILTON. 



loS 



but as one long brooded upon, and its non-fulfilment matter of self- 
reproach. 

If this sonnet stood alone, its relevance to a poetical, or even a 
literary performance, might be doubtful. But at the time of its com- 
position it is enclosed in a letter to an unnamed friend, who seems 
to have been expressing his surprise that the Cambridge B. A was 
not settling himself, now that his education was complete, to a 
profession.' Milton's apologetic letter is extant, and was printed 
by Birch in 1738. It intimates that Milton did not consider his 
education, for the purposes he had in view, as anything like com- 
plete. It is not "the endless delight of speculation," but "a re- 
ligious advisement how best to undergo ; not taking thought of 
being late, so it give advantage to be more fit." He repudiates 
the love of learning for its own sake ; knowledge is not an end, it 
is only equipment "for performance. There is here no specific en- 
gagement as to the nature of the performance. But what it is to 
be, is suggested by the enclosure of the " Patriarchian stanza " 
(/. e., the sonnet). This notion that his life was, like Samuel's, a 
dedicated life, dedicated to a service which required a long proba- 
tion, recurs again more than once in his writings. It is emphat- 
ically repeated, in 1641, in a passage of the pamphlet No. 4 : 

" None hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more un- 
wearied spirit none shall — that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life 
and full license will extend. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with 
any knowing reader that for some few years yet I may go on trust with 
him towards the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not 
to be raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that 
which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher 
fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame 
Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal 
Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his 
seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the life of 
whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious and select reading, 
steady observation, insight ir.to all seemly and generous acts and affairs. 
Till which in some measure be compassed, at mine own peril and cost, I re- 
fuse not to sustain this expectation, from as many as are not loth to hazard 
so much credulity upon the best pledges I can give them." 

In 1638, at the age of nine and twenty Milton has already de- 
termined that this lifework shall be a poem, an epic poem, and that 
its subject shall probably be the Arthurian legend. 

*' Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, 
Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem, 
Aut dicam invicts sociali fcedere mensae 
Magnanimos heroas, et, o modo spiritus adsit ! 
Frangam Saxonicas Britonum sub marte phalangas." 

*' May I find such a friend . . . when, if ever, I shall revive in song 
our native princes, and among them Arthur moving to the fray even in the 
nether world, and when I will, if only God's Spirit aid me, break the 
Saxon bands before our Britons' prowess." 



lo6 MILTON. 

The same announcement is reproduced in the EpitapJiiuin 
Damonis, 1639, and, in Pamphlet No. 4, in the often quoted words : 

" Perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at 
under twenty, or thereabout, met with acceptance, ... I began to assent 
to them (the Italians) and divers of my friends here at home, and not less 
to an inward prompting which nows grows daily upon me, that my labour 
and intent study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with the 
strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written 
to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die." 

Between the publication of the collected Poems in 1645, ^n<i fhe 
appearance of Paradise Lost in 1667, a period of twenty-seven 
years, Milton gave no public sign of redeeming this pledge. He 
seemed to his cotemporaries to have renounced the follies of his 
youth, the gew-gaws of verse, and to have sobered down into the use- 
ful citizen. " Le bon poete," thought Malherbe, " n'est pas plus 
utile a I'etat qu'un bon joueur de cjuilles." Milton had postponed 
his poem, in 1641, till "the land had once enfranchised herself from 
this impertinent yoke of prelatry, under whose inquisitorious- and 
tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish." Prelatry 
was swept away, and he asked for further remand on account of 
the war. Peace was concluded, the country was settled under 
the strong government of a Protector, and Milton's great work did 
not appear. It was not even preparing. He was writing not 
poetry but prose, and that most ephemeral and valueless kind of 
prose, pamphlets, extempore articles on the topics of the day. He 
poured out reams of them, in simple unconsciousness that they had 
no influence whatever on the current of events. 

Nor was it that, during these five-and-twenty years, Milton was 
meditating in secret what he could not bring forward in public ; 
that he was only holding back from publishing, because there was 
no public ready to listen to his song. In these years Milton was 
neither writing nor thinking poetry. Of the twenty-four sonnets, 
indeed — twenty-four, reckoning the twenty-lined piece, " The forcers 
of conscience," as a sonnet — eleven belong to this period. But 
they do not form a continuous series, such as do Wordsworth's 
Ecclesiastical Sonnets, nor do they evince a sustained mood of 
poetical meditation. On the contrary, their very force and beauty 
consist in their being the momentary and spontaneous explosion 
of an emotion welling up from the depths of the soul, and forcing 
itself into metrical expression, as it were, in spite of the writer. 
While the first eight sonnets, written before 1645, ^.re sonnets of 
reminiscence and intention, like those of the Italians, or the ordi- 
nary English sonnnet, the eleven sonnets of Milton's silent period 
— from 1645 to 1658 — are records of present feeling kindled by 
actual facts. In their naked, unadorned simplicity of language, 
they may easily seem, to a reader fresh from Petrarch, to be homely 
and prosaic. Place them in relation to the circumstance on which 
each piece turns, and we begin to feel the superiority for poetic 
effect of real emotion over emotion meditated and revived. His* 



MILTON. 107 

tory has in it that which can touch us more abidingly than any 
fiction= It is this actuahty which distinguishes the sonnets of 
Milton from any other sonnets. Of this difference Wordsworth 
was conscious when he struck out the phrase, -'In his hand the 
thing becaine a trump." Macaulay compared the sonnets in their 
majestic severity to the collects. They remind us of a Hebrew 
psalm, with its undisguised oulrush of rage, revenge, exultation, 
or despair, where nothing is due to art or artifice, and whose poe- 
trv is the expression of the heart, and not a branch of literature. 
It is in the sonnets we most realise the force of Wordsworth's 
imiige — 

" Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea." 

We are not then to look in the sonnets for latent traces of the 
suspended poetic creation. They come from the other side of 
Milton's nature, the political, not the artistic. They are akin to 
the prose pamphlets, not to Paradise Lost. Just when the sonnets 
end, the composition of the epic was taken in hand. The last of 
the sonnets (23 in the ordinary numeration) was written in 1658; 
and it was to the same year that our authority, Aubrey-Phillips, 
refers his beginning to occupy himself with Paradise Lost. He 
had by this time settled the two points about which he had been 
long in doubt, the subject and the form. Long before bringing 
himself to the point of composition, he had decided upon the fall 
of man as subject, and upon the narrative, or epic, form, in prefer- 
ence to the dramatic. It is even possible that a few isolated pas- 
sages of the poem, as it now stands, may have been written before. 
Of one such passage we have Aubrey's assurance that it was 
written fifteen or sixteen years before 1658, and while he was still 
contemplating a drama. The lines are Satan's speech, P. L. iv. 
32, beginning — 

" O, thou that with surpassing glory crowned." 

These lines, Phillips says, his uncle recited to him, as forming the 
opening of his tragedy. They are modelled, as the classical reader 
will perceive, upon Euripides, Possibly they were not intended 
for the very first lines, since if Milton intended to follow the prac- 
tice of his model, the lofty lyrical tone of this address should have 
been introduced by a prosaic matter-of-fact setting forth of the sit- 
uation, as in the Euripidean prologue. There are other passages 
in the poem which have the air of being insitious in the place where 
they stand. The lines in Book iv., now in question, may reason- 
ably be referred to 1640-42, the date of those leaves in the Trinity 
College MS., in which Milton has written down, with his own hand, 
various sketches of tragedies, which might possibly be adopted as 
his final choice. 

A passage in The Reason of CJiurch Governjnent, written at 
the same period, 1641, gives us the fullest account of his hesitation. 
It was a hesitation caused partly by the wealth of matter which his 



Io8 MILTON. 

readini,' suggested to him, partly by the consciousness that he ought 
not to begin in haste while each year was ripening his powers. Every 
one who has undertaken a work of any length has made the experi- 
ence, that the faculty of composition will not work with ease until the 
reason is satisfied that the subject chosen is a congenial one. 
Gibbon has told us himself that many periods of history upon 
which he tried his pen, even after the memorable 15th October, 
1764, when he "sate musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while 
the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter." 
We know how many sketches of possible tragedies Racine would 
make before he could adopt one as the appropriate theme, on which 
he could work with that thorough enjoyment of the labour, which is 
necessary to give life and verve to any creation, whether of the 
poet or the orator. 

The leaves of the Trinity College MS,, which are cotemporary 
with his confidence to the readers of his tract Of Chuj'ch Govetn- 
ment, exhibit a list of nearly one hundred subjects, which had oc- 
curred to him from time to time as practicable subjects. From the 
mode of entry we see that, already in 1641, a scriptural was likely 
to have the preference over a profane subject, and that among 
scriptural subjects Paradise Lost (the familiar title appears in this 
early note) stands out prominently above the next. The historical 
subjects are all taken from native history, none are foreign, and all 
from the time before the Roman conquest. The scriptural sub- 
jects are partly from the Old, partly from the New, Testament. 
Some of these subjects are named and nothing more, while others 
are slightly sketched out. Among these latter are Baptistes, on 
the death of John the Baptist ; and Christus Patie?is, apparently 
to be confined to the agony in the garden. Of Pai-adise L.ost there 
are four drafts in greater detail than any of the others. These 
drafts of the plot or action, though none of them that which was 
finally adopted, are sufficiently near to the action of the poem as it 
stands, to reveal to us the fact that the author's imaginative con- 
ception of what he intended to produce was generated, cast, and 
moulded at a comparatively early age. The commonly received 
notion, therefore, with which authors, as they age, are wont to 
comfort themselves, that one of the greatest feats of original in- 
vention achieved by man was begun after fifty, must be thus far 
modified. Paradise Lost was co7)iposed after fifty, but was co7t- 
ceived ?i\. thirty-two. Hence the high degree of perfection realised 
in the total result. For there were combined to produce it the op- 
posite virtues of two distinct periods of mental development ; the 
daring imagination and fresh emotional play of early manhood, 
with the exercised judgment and chastened taste of ripened years. 
We have regarded the twenty-five years of Milton's life between 
1 641 and the commencement of Paradise Lost, as time ill laid out 
upon inferior work which any one could do, and which was not 
worth doing by any one. Yet it may be made a question if in any 
other mode than by adjournment of his eUrly design, Milton could 
have attained to that union of original strength with severe re» 



MILTON. 109 

straint, which distinguishes from all other poetry, except that of 
Virgil, the three great poems of his old age. If the fatigue of age 
is sometimes felt in Paradise Regained, we feel in Paradise Lost 
only (in the words of Chateaubriand), " la maturite de I'age a travers 
les passions des legeres annees ; une charme extraordinaire de 
vieillesse et de jeunesse." 

A still further inference is warranted by the Trinity College 
jottings of 1 641. Not the critics merely, but readers ready to 
sympathise, have been sometimes inclined to wish that Milton had 
devoted his power to a more human subject, in which the poet's 
invention could have had freer play, and for which his reader's 
interest could have been more ready. And it has been thought 
that the choice of a BibHcal subject indicates the narrowing effect 
of age, adversity, and blindness combined. We now know that the 
Fall was the theme, if not defermined on, at least predominant 
in Milton's thoughts, at the age of thirty-two. His ripened judg- 
ment only approved a selection made in earlier years, and in days 
full of hope. That in selecting a scriptural subject he was not in 
fact exercising any choice, but was determined by his circum- 
stances, is only what must be said of all choosing. With all his 
originality, Milton was still a man of his age. A Puritan poet, in a 
Puritan environment, could not have done otherwise. But even 
had choice been in his power, it is doubtful if he would have had 
the same success with a subject taken from history. 

First, looking at his public. He was to write in English. This, 
which had at one time been matter of doubt, had at an early stage 
come to be his decision. Nor had the choice of English been 
made for the sake of popularity, which he despised. He did not 
desire to write for the many, but for the few. But he was en- 
thusiastically patriotic. He had entire contempt for the shouts of 
the mob, but the EngHsh nation, as embodied in the persons of the 
wise and good, he honoured and reverenced with all the depth of 
his nature. It was for the sake of his nation that he was to devote 
his life to a work, which was to ennoble her tongue among the 
languages of Europe. 

He was then to write in English, for the English, not popularly, 
but nationally. This resolution at once limited his subject. He 
wlio aspires to be the poet of a nation is bound to adopt a hero who 
is already dear to that people, to choose a subject and characters 
which are already familiar to them. This is no rule of literary art 
arbitrarily enacted by the critics, it is a dictate of reason, and has 
been the practice of all the great national poets. The more 
obvious examples will occur to every reader. But it may be ob- 
served that even the Greek tragedians, who addressed a more 
limited audience than the epic poets, took their plots from the best 
known legends touching the fortunes of the royal houses of the 
Hellenic race. Now to the English reader of the seventeenth 
century — and the same holds good to this day — there were only 
two cycles of persons and events sufficiently known beforehand to 
admit of being assumed by a poet. He must go either to the 



no MILTON. 

Bible, or to tlie annals of England. Thus far Milton's choice of 
subject was limited by the consideration of the public for whom he 
wrote. 

Secondly, he was still farther restricted by a condition which 
the nature of his own intelligence imposed upon himself. It was 
necessary for Milton that the events and personages, which were 
to arouse and detain his interests, should be real events and per- 
sonages. The mere play of fancy with the pretty aspects of things 
could not satisfy him ; he wanted to feel beneath him a substantial 
world of reality. He had not the dramatist's imagination which 
can body forth fictitious characters with such life-like reality that 
it can and does itself believe in their existence. Macaulay has 
truly said that Milton's genius is lyrical, not dramatic. His lyre 
will only echo real emotion, and his imagination is only stirred by 
real circumstances. In his youth he had been within the fasci- 
nation of the romances of chivalry, as well in their original form 
as in the reproductions of Ariosto and Spenser. While under 
this influence, he had thought of seeking his subject among the 
heroes of these lays of old minstrelsy. And as one of his principles 
was that his hero must be a national hero, it was of course upon 
the Arthurian cycle that his aspiration fixed. When he did so, he 
no doubt believed at least the historical existence of Arthur. As 
soon, however, as he came to understand the fabulous basis of the 
Arthurian legend, it became unfitted for his use. In the Trinity 
College MS. of 1641, Arthur has already disappeared from the list 
of possible subjects — a list which contains thirty-eight suggestions 
of names from British or Saxon history, such as Vortigern", Edward 
the Confessor, Harold, Macbeth, &c. While he demanded the 
basis of reality for his personages, with a true instinct he at the 
same time rejected all that fell within the period of well-ascertained 
history. He made the Conquest the lower limit of his choice. In 
this negative decision against historical romance we recognise 
Milton's judgment, and his correct estimate of his own powers. 
Those who have been thought to succeed best in engrafting fiction 
upon history, Shakspeare or Walter Scott, have been eminently 
human poets, and have achieved their measure of success by in- 
vesting some well-known name with the attributes of ordinary hu- 
manity such as we all know it. This was precisely what Milton 
could not have done. He had none of that sympathy with which 
Shakspeare embraced all natural and common affections of his 
brother men. Milton, burning as he did with a consuming fire of 
passion, and yearning for rapt communion with select souls, had 
withal an aloofness from ordinary men and women, and a proud 
disdain of commonplace joy and sorrow, which has led hasty biog- 
raphers and critics to represent him as hard, austere — an iron man 
of iron mould. This want of interest in common life disqualified 
him for the task of revivifying historic scenes. 

Milton's mental constitution, then, demanded, in the material 
upon which it was to work, a combination of qualities such as verj; 



M/LTO.V, 111 

few subjects could offer. The events and personages must be real 
and substantial, for he could not occupy himself seriously with airy 
nothing- and creatures oi pure fancy. Yet they must not be such 
events and personages a.' history had portrayed to us with well- 
known characters, and all their virtues, faults, foibles, and peculi- 
arities. And, lastly, it was requisite that they should be the 
common property and the familiar interest of a wide circle of Eng- 
lish readers. 

These being the conditions required in the subject, it is obvious 
that no choice was left to the poet in the England of the seven- 
teeth century but a biblical subject. And among the many pic- 
turesque episodes which the Hebrew Scriptures present, the narra- 
tive of the Fall stands out with a character of all-embracing com- 
prehensiveness which belongs to no other single event in the 
Jewish annals. The first section of the Book of Genesis clothes 
in a dramatic form the dogmatic idea from which was developed m 
the course of the ages the whole scheme of Judaico-Christian an- 
thropology. In this world drama, Heaven above and Hell beneath, 
the powers of light and those of darkness are both brought upon 
the scene in conflict with each other, over the fate of the inhabit- 
ants of our globe— a minute ball of matter suspended between two 
infinities. This gigantic and unmanageable material is so com- 
pletely mastered by the poet's imagination, that we are made to 
feel at one and the same time the petty dimensions of our earth in 
comparision with primordial space and almighty power, and the pro- 
found import to us of the issue depending on the conflict. Other 
poets, of inferior powers, have from time to time attempted, with dif- 
ferent degrees of success, some of the minor Scriptural historic:; : 
Bodmer, the Noachian Deluge ; Solomon Gessner, the Death of 
Abel, &c. And Milton himself, after he had spent his full strength 
upon his greater theme, recurred in Samson Agonistes to one such 
episode, which he had deliberately set aside before, as not giving 
verge enough for the sweep of his soaring conception. 

These considerations duly weighed, it will be found that the 
subject of the Fall of Man was not so much Milton's choice as 
his necessity. Among all the traditions of the peoples of the 
earth, there is not extant another story which could have been 
adequate to his demands. Biographers may have been somewhat 
misled by his speaking of himself as " long choosing and begin- 
ning late." He did not begin till 165S, when he was already fifty, 
and it has been somewhat hastilv inferred that he did not choose 
till the date at which he began' But as we have seen, he had 
already chosen at least as early as 1642, when the plan of a drama 
on the subject, and under the title of Paradise Lost, was fully de- 
veloped.- In the interval between 1642 and 1658, he changed the 
form from a drama to an epic, but his choice remained unaltered. 
And as the address to the sun {Paradise Lost, iv. 32) was com- 
posed at the earlier of these dates, it appears that he had already 
formulated even the rhythm and cadence of. the poem that was 
to be. 



112 MILTON. 

I have s«iid that this subject of the Fall was Milton's necessity, 
being the only subject which his mind, " in the spacious circuits 
of her musing," found large enough. But as it was no abrupt or 
arbitrary choice, so it was not forced upon him from without, in 
the way in which \\\^ Deeds of the Roman People {Gesta Populi Ro- 
ina?ii) were forced upon the reluctant Virgil. We must again remind 
ourselves that Milton had a Calvinistic bringing up. And Calvinism 
in pious Puritan souls of that fervent age was not the attenuated 
creed of the eighteenth century, the Calvinism which went not be- 
yond the personal gratification of safety for myself, and for the rest 
damnation. When Milton was being reared, Calvinism was not old 
and effete, a mere doctrine. It was a living system of thought, and 
one which carried the mind upwards towards the Eternal will, 
rather than downwards towards my personal security. Keble has 
said of the old Catholic views, founded on sacramental symbolism, 
that they are more poetical than any others in the church. But it 
must be acknowledged that a predestinarian scheme, leading the 
cogitation upwards to dwell upon " the heavenly things before the 
foundation of the world," opens a conception and poetical frame- 
work with which none other in the whole cycle of human thought 
can compare. Not election and reprobation as set out in the petty 
chicanery of Calvin's Institutes, but the prescience of absolute 
wisdom revolving all the possibilities of time, space, and matter. 
Poetry has been defined as " the suggestion of noble grounds for 
the noble emotions," and, in this respect," none of the world-epics 
— there are at most five such in existence — can compete with 
Paradise Lost. The melancholy pathos of Lucretius, indeed, 
pierces the heart with a two-edged sword more keen than Milton's, 
but the compass of Lucretius' horizon is much less, being limited 
to this earth and its inhabitants The horizon of Paradise Lost 
is not narrower than all space, its chronology not shorter than 
eternity ; the globe of our earth a mere spot in the physical universe, 
and that universe itself a drop suspended in the infinite empyrean. 
His aspiration had thus reached " one of the highest acrs that 
human contemplation circling upwards can make from the glassy sea 
whereon she stands" {Doctr. and Disc). Like his cotemporary 
Pascal, his mind had beaten her wings against the prison walls 
of human thought. 

The vastness of the scheme of Paradise Lost may become 
more apparent to us if w^e remark that, within its embrace, there 
seems to be equal place for both the systems of physical astronomy 
which were current in the seventeenth century. In England, about 
the time Paradise Lost was being written, the Copernican theory, 
which placed the sun in the centre of our system, was. already 
the established belief of the few well-informed. The old Ptole- 
maic or Alphonsine system, which explained the phenomena on 
the hypothesis of nine (or ten) transparent hollow spheres wheel- 
ing round the stationary earth, was still the received astronomy of 
ordinary people. These two behefs, the one based on science, 
though still wanting the calculation which Newton was to supply 



MILTON. 113 

to make it demonstrative, the other supported by the tradition of 
ages, were, at the time we speak of, in presence of each other in 
the public mind. They are in presence of each oUier also in Mil- 
ton's epic. And the systems confront each other in the poem, in 
much the same relative position which they occupy in the mind of 
the public. The ordinary, habitual mode of speaking of celestial 
phenomena is Ptolemaic (see Paradise Lost, vii. 339; jil. 481). 
The conscious, or doctrinal, exposition of the same phenomena is 
Copernican (see /'(^rrti^zj-^Z^j-/, viii. 122). Sharp as is the con- 
trast between the two systems, the one being the direct contradic- 
tory of the other, they are lodged together, not harmonised, witl:in 
the vast circuit of the poet's imagination. The precise mechanism 
of an object so little as is our world in comparison with the im- 
mense totality may be justly disregarded. *' De minimis non curat 
poeta." In the universe of being the difference between a heho- 
centric and a geocentric theory of our solar system is of as small 
moment as the reconcilement of fixed fate, free-will foreknowledge 
absolute is in the realm of absolute intelligence. The one is the 
frivolous pastime of devils ; the other the Great Architect 

" Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move 
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide." 

As one, and the principal, inconsistency in Milton's present- 
ment of his matter has now been mentioned, a general remark 
may be made upon the conceptual incongruities in Pai'adise Lost. 
The poem abounds in such, and the critics, from Addison down- 
wards, have busied themselves in finding out more and more of 
them. Milton's geography of the world is as obscure and unten- 
able as that of Herodotus. The notes of time cannot stand to- 
gether. To give an example : Eve says {Pa7-adise Lost, iv. 449) — 

" That day I oft remember, when from sleep 
I first awak'd." 

But in the chronology of the poem, Adam himself, whose creation 
preceded that of Eve, was but three days old at the time this re- 
miniscence is repeated to him. The mode in which the Son of God 
is spoken of is not either consistent Athanasianism or consistent 
Arianism. Above all, there is an incessant confusion of material 
and immaterial in the acts ascribed to the angels. Dr. Johnson, 
who wished for consistency, would have had it preserved " by 
keeping immateriality out of sight." And a general arraignment 
has been laid against Milton of a vagueness and looseness of ima^jery 
which contrasts unfavourably with the vivid and precise detail of 
other poets — of Homer or of Dante, for example. 

Now first, it must be said that Milton is not one of the poets of 
inaccurate imagination. He could never, like Scott, have let the 
precise picture of the swan on " still Saint Mary's lake " slip into 
the namby-pamby " sweet Saint Mary's lake." When he intends 
a picture, he is unmistakably distinct ; his outline is firm and hard. 

S 



114 MILTON. 

But he is not often intending pictures. He is not, like Dante, 
always seeing — he is mostly thinking in a dream, or as Coleridge 
best expressed it, he is not a picturesque, but a musical poet. The 
pictures in Paradise Lost are like the paintings on the walls of 
some noble hall — only part of the total magnificence. He did not 
aim at that finish of minute parts in which each bit fits into every 
other. For it was only in this way that the theme he had chosen 
could be handled at all. The impression of vastness, the sense 
that everything, as Bishop Butler says, " runs up into infinity," 
would have been impaired if he had drawn attention to the details 
of his figures. Had he had upon his canvas only a single human 
incident, with ordinary human agents, he would have known, as 
well as other far inferior artists, how to secure perfection of illusion 
by exactness of detail. But he had undertaken to present, not the 
world of human experience, but a supernatural world, peopled by 
supernatural beings, God and his Son, angels and archangels, 
devils ; a world in which Sin and Death may be personified with- 
out palpable absurdity. Even his one human pair are exceptional 
beings, from whom we are prepared not to demand conformity to 
the laws of life which now prevail in our world. Had he presented 
all these spiritual personages in definite form to the eye, the result 
would have been degradation. We should have had the ridiculous 
instead of the sublime, as in the scene of the Iliad, v^her^ Diomede 
wounds Aphrodite in the hand, and sends her crying home to her 
father. Once or twice Milton has ventured too near the limit of 
material adaptation, trying to explain how angelic natures subsist, 
as in the passage {Paradise Lost, v. 405) where Raphael tells Adam 
that angels eat and digest food like man. Taste here receives a 
shock, because the incongruity, which before was latent, is forced 
upon our attention. We are threatened with being transported 
out of the conventional world of Heaven, Hell, Chaos, and Paradise, 
to which we had well adapted ourselves, into the real world in 
which we know^ that such beings could not breathe and move. 

For the world of Paradise Lost is an ideal, conventional world, 
quite as much as the w^orld of the A?'abia7t AHghts, or the world of 
the chivalrous romance, or that of the pastoral novel. Not only 
dramatic, but all, poetry is founded on illusion. We must, though 
it be but for the moment, suppose it true. We must be transported 
out of the actual world into that world in which the given scene is 
laid. It is chiefly the business of the poet to affect this transpor- 
tation, but the reader (or hearer) must aid. " Willst du Dichter 
ganz verstehen, musst in Dichter's Lande gehen." If the reader's 
imagination is not active enough to assist the poet, he must at 
least not resist him. When we are once inside the poet's heaven, 
our critical faculty may justly require that what takes place 
there shall be consistent with itself, with the laws of that 
fantastic world. But we may not begin by objecting that it is 
impossible that such a world should exist. If, in any age, the 
power of imagination is enfeebled, the reader becomes more unable 
to make this effort ; he ceases to co-operate with the poet. Much 



MILTON. 115 

of the criticisim which we meet with on Paradise Lost resolves itself 
into a refusal on the part of the critic to make that initial abandon- 
ment to the conditions which the poet demands ; a determination 
to insist that his heaven, peopled with deities, dominations, princi- 
palities, and powers, shall have the same material laws which 
govern our planetary system. It is not, as we often hear it said, 
that the critical faculty is unduly developed in the nineteenth 
century. It is that the imaginative faculty fails us ; and when that 
is the case, criticism is powerless— it has no fundamental assump- 
tion upon which its judgments can proceed. 

It is the triumph of Milton's skill to haVe made his ideal world 
actual, if not to every English mind's eye, yet to a larger number 
than have ever been reached by any other poetry in our language. 
Popular (in the common use of the word) Milton has not been, and 
cannot be. But the world he created has taken possession of the 
public mind. Huxley complains that the false cosmogony, which 
will not yield to the conclusions of scientific research, is derived 
from the seventli book of Paradise Lost, rather than from Genesis. 
This success Milton owes partly to his selection of his subject, 
partly to his skill in handling it. In his handling, he presents his 
spiritual existences with just so must relief as to endow them with 
life and personality, and not with that visual distinctness which 
would at once reveal their spectral immateriahty, and so give a 
shock to the illusion. We might almost say of his personages that 
they are shapes, "if shape it might be called that shape had none." 
By his art of suggestion by association, he does all he can to aid us 
to realise his agents, and at the moment when distinctness would 
disturb, he withdraws the object into a mist, and so disguises the 
incongruities which he could not avoid. The tact that avoids 
difficulties inherent in the nature of things is an art which gets the 
least appreciation either in life or in literature. But if we would 
have some measure of the skill which in /'^r^^^^/i-^? Z^j/ has made 
impossible beings possible to the imagination, we may find it in 
contrasting them with the incarnated abstraction and spirit voices, 
which we encounter at every turn in Shelley, creatures who leave 
behind them no more distinct impression than that we have been in 
a dream peopled with ghosts. Shelley, too, 

" Voyag'd th' unreal, vast, unbounded deep 
Of horri])le confusion." — Paradise Lost, x. 470, 

and left it the chaos which he found it. Milton has elicited from 
similar elements a conception so life-like that his poetical version 
has inseparably grafted itself upon, if it has not taken the place of, 
the historical narrative of the original creation. 

So much Milton has effected by his skilful treatment. But the 
illusion was greatly facilitated by his choice of suljject. He had 
not to create his supernatural personages, they were already there. 
The Father and the Son, the Angels, Satan, Baa) and Moloch. 
Adam and Eve, were in full possession of the populni' imagination, 
and more familiar to it than any other set of known names. Nor 



Ii6 MILTON. 

was the belief accorded to them a half belief, a bare admission of 
their possible existence, such as prevails at other times or in some 
countries. In the England of Milton, the angels and devils of the 
Jewish Scriptures were more real beings, and better vouched than 
any historical personages could be. The old chronicles were full of 
lies, but this was Bible truth. There might very likely have been 
a Henry VIII., and he might have been such as he is described, 
but at any rate he was dead and gone, while Satan still lived and 
walked the earth, the identical Satan who had deceived Eve. 

Nor was it only to the poetic public that his personages were 
real, true, and living beings. The poet himself believes as entirely 
in their existence as did his readers. I insist upon this point, be- 
cause one of the first of living critics has declared oi Pa?'adise Lost 
that it is a poem in which every artifice of invention is consciously 
employed, not a single fact being, for an instant, conceived as ten- 
able by any living faith. (Ruskin, Sesa?ne afid Lilies, p. 138). On 
the contrary, we shall not rightly apprehend either the poetry or 
the character of the poet until we feel that through Paradise Lost^ 
as in Paradise Regained and Sa7/iso?i, Milton felt himself to be 
standing on the sure ground of fact and reality. It was not in Mil- 
ton's nature to be a showman, parading before an audience a phan- 
tasmagoria of spirits, which he himself knew to be puppets tricked 
up for the entertainment of an idle hour. We are told by Lockhart, 
that the old man who told the story of Gilpin Horner to Lady Dal- 
keith bondjide believed the existence of the elf. Lady Dalkeith 
repeated the tale to Walter Scott, who worked it up with consum- 
mate skill into the Lay of the Last Minstrel. This is a case of 
a really believed legend of" diablerie becoming the source of a Hter- 
ary fiction. Scott neither believed in the reality of thegobhn page 
himself, nor expected his readers to believe it. He could not rise 
beyond the poetry of amusement, and no poetry with only this mo- 
tive can ever be more than literary art. 

Other than this was Milton's conception of his own function. 
Of the fashionable verse, such as was written in the Caroline age, 
or in any age, he disapproved, not only because it was imperfect 
art, but because it was untrue utterance. Poems that were raised 
"from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which 
flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar encomiast, or the 
trencher fury of a rhyming parasite," were in his eyes treachery to 
the poet's high vocation. 

" Poetical powers ' are the inspired gift of God rarely bestowed . . . 
in every nation, and are of power, beside the ofifice of a pulpit, to imlireed 
and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay 
the perturbation of the mind, and set the affections in right tune ; to cele- 
brate in glorious and 1 of tv hymns the throne and equipage of God's al- 
mightiness, and what he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with 
high providence in his church ; to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and 
saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly 
through faith against the enemies of Christ ; to deplore the general re- 
lapses of kingdoms and states from justice <tiid God's true worship.' " 



MILTON. 117 

So he had written in 1642, and this lofty faith in his calling sup- 
ported him twenty years later, in the arduous labour of his attempt 
to realise his own ideal. In setting himself down to compose Par- 
adise Lost and Regained., he regarded himself not as an author, but 
as a medium, the mouth-piece of " that eternal Spirit who can en- 
rich with all utterance and all knowledge : Urania, heavenly muse," 
visits him nightly, 

*' And dictates to me slumb'ring, or inspires 
Easy my unpremeditated verse ." — Paradise Lost, ix. 24. 

Urania bestows the flowing words and musical sweetness \ to God's 
Spirit he looks to 

" Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers 
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence 
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell 
Of things invisible to mortal sight." — Paradise Lost, 50. 

The singers with whom he would fain equal himself are not Dante, 
or Tasso, or, as Dryden would have it, Sj. enser, but 

" Blind Thamyris, and blind Moeonides, 
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old." 

As he is equalled with these in misfortune — loss of sight — he would 
emulate them in function. Orpheus and Musaeus are the poetshe 
would fain have as the companions of his midnight meditation 
{Penserosa). And the function of the poet is like those of the 
prophet in the old dispensation, not to invent, but to utter. It is 
God's truth which passes his lips— lips hallowed by the touch of 
sacred fire. He is the passive instrument through whom flowed 
the emanation from on high ; his words were not his own,^ but a 
suggestion. Even for style he was indebted to his " celestial pa- 
troness who deigns her nightly visitation unimplor'd." 

Milton was not dependent upon a dubious tradition in the sub- 
ject he had selected. Man's fall and recovery were recorded in the 
Scriptures. And the two media of truth, the internal and the ex- 
ternal, as deriving from the same source, must needs be in harmony. 
That the Spirit enhghtens the mind within, in this belief the Pu- 
ritan saint, the poet, and the prophet, who all met in Milton, were 
at Qne. That the Old Testament Scriptures were also a revelation 
from God, was an article of faith which he had never questioned. 
Nor did he only receive these books as conveying in substance a 
divine view of the world's history, he regarded them as in the letter 
a transcript of fact. 

If the poet-prophet would tell the story of creation or redemp- 
tion, he is thus restrained not only by the general outline and im- 
agery of the Bible, but by its very words. And here we must note 
the skill of the poet in surmounting an added or artificial difficulty, 
in the subject he had chosen as combined with his notion of inspi- 
ration. He must not deviate in a single syllable from the words of 



Il8 MILTON, 

the Hebrew books. He must take up Into his poem the whole of 
the sacred narrative. This he must do, not merely because his 
readers would expect such literal accuracy from him, but because 
to himself that narrative was the very truth which he was undertak- 
ing to deliver. The additions which his fancy or inspiration might 
supply must be restrained by this severe law, they should be such 
as to aid the reader's imagination to conceive how the event took 
place. They must by no means be suffered to alter, disfigure, tra- 
duce the substance or the letter of the revelation. This is what 
Milton has done. He has told the story of creation in the very 
words of Scripture. The vvhole of the seventh book is little more 
than a paraphrase of a few verses of Genesis. A^hat he has added 
is so little incongruous with his original, that most English men and 
women would probably have some difficulty in discriminating in 
recollection the part they derive from Moses, from that which they 
have added from the paraphrast. In Genesis it is the serpent who 
tempts Eve, in virtue of his natural wiliness. In Milton it is Satan 
who has entered into the body of a serpent, and supplied the intel- 
ligence. Here, indeed, Milton was only adopting a gloss, as ancient 
at least as the Book of Wisdom (ii. 24). But it is the gloss, and 
not the text of Moses, which is in possession of our minds, and 
who has done most to lodge it there, Milton or the commentators ? 
Again, it is Milton and not Moses who makes tlie serpent pluck and 
eat the first apple from the tree. But Bp, Wilson comments upon 
the words of Genesis (iii. 6) as though tliey contained this purely 
Miltonic circumstance. 

It could hardly but be that one or two of the incidents which 
Milton has supplied, the popular imagination has been unable to 
homologate. Such an incident is the placing of artillery in the 
wars in heaven. We reject this suggestion, and find it mars prob 
ability. But it would not seem so improbable to Milton's co- 
temporaries, not only because it was an article of the received 
poetic tradition (see Ronsard 6, p. 40), as because fire-arms had 
not quite ceased to be regarded as a devilish enginery of a new 
warfare, unfair in the knightly code of honour, a base substitute of 
mechanism for individual valour. It was gunpowder and not Don 
Quixote which had destroyed the age of chivalry. 

Another of Milton's fictions which has been found too gro- 
tesque is the change [P. Z., x. 508) of the demons into serpents, who 
hiss their Prince on his return from his embassy. Here it is not, 
I think, so much the unnatural character of the incident itself, as 
its gratuitousness which offends. It does not help us to conceive 
the situation. A suggestion of Chateaubriand may, therefore, o;o 
some way towards reconciling the reader even to this caprice of 
imagination. It indicates, he says, the degradation of Satan, who, 
from the superb Intelligence of the early scenes of the poem, is 
become at its close a hideous reptile. He has not triumphed, but 
has failed, and is degraded into the old dragon, who haunts among 
the damned. The bruising of his head has already commenced. 

The bridge, again, which Sin and Death construct {Paradise 



MILTON. Iig 

'Lost, X. 300), leading from the moufh of hell to the wall of the 
world, has a chilling effect upon the imagination of a modern 
reader. It does not assist the conception of the cosmical system 
which we accept in the earlier books. This clumsy fiction seems 
more at home in the grotesque and lawless mythology of the Turks, 
or in the Persian poet Sadi, who is said by Marmontel to have 
adopted it from the Turk. If Milton's intention were to reproduce 
Jacob'sladder, he should, like Dante [Parad. xxi. 25), have made it 
the means of communication between heaven and earth: 

It is possible that Milton himself, after the experiment of Para- 
dise Lost was fully before him, suspected that he had supplemented 
too much for his purpose ; that his imagery, which was designed 
to illustrate history, might stand in its light. For in the composi- 
tion of Paradise Regaiiied (published 1671) he has adopted a much 
severer style. In this poem he has not only curbed his imagination, 
but has almost suppressed it. He has amphfied, but has hardly 
introduced any circumstance which is not in the original. Para- 
dise Regained is little more than a paraphrase of the Temptation 
as found in the synoptical gospels. It is a marvel of ingenuity 
that more than two thousand lines of blank verse can have been 
constructed out of some twenty lines of prose, without the addition 
of any invented incident, or the insertion of any irrelevant digres- 
sion. In the first three books of Paradise Regained there is not a 
single simile. Nor yet can it be said that the version of the gospel 
narrative has the fault of most paraphrases, viz., that of weakening 
the effect, and obliterating the chiselled features of the original. 
Let a reader take Paradise Regained VlOX. as a theme used as a 
canvas for poetical embroidery, an opportunity for an author to 
show off his powers of writing, but as a bond fide attempt to im- 
press upon the mind the story of the Temptation, and he will ac- 
knowledge the concealed art of the genuine epic poet, bent before 
all things upon telling his tale. It will still be capable of being 
alleged that the story told does not interest ; that the composition 
is dry, hard, barren ; the style as of set purpose divested of the 
attributes of poetry. It is not necessar}', indeed, that an epic 
should be in twelve books ; but we do demand in an epic poem 
multiplicity of character and variety of incident. In Paradise Re- 
gained ihtro. are only two personages, both of whom are super- 
natural. Indeed, they can scarcely be called personages ; the 
poet, in his fidelity to the letter, not having thought fit to open up 
the fertile vein of dehneation which was afforded by the human 
character of Christ The speakers are no more than the abstract 
principles of good and evil, two voices who hold a rhetorical dis- 
putation through four books and two thousand lines. 

The usual explanation of the frigidity of Paradise Regained \% 
the suggestion, which is nearest at liand, viz., that it is the effect 
of age. Like Ben Jonson's N'ezu Inn, it betrays the feebleness of 
senility, and has one of the most certain marks of that stage of 
authorship, the attempt to imitate himself in those points in which 
he was once strong. " When glad no more, He wears a face of joy, 



I20 MILTON. 

because He lias been glad of yore." Or it is an " oeiivre de lassi- 
tude," a continuation, with the inevitable defect of continuations, 
that of preserving the forms and wanting the soul of the original, 
like the second parts of Faust, of Don Quixote, and so many other 
books. 

Both these explanations of the inferiority of Paradise Regained 
have probability. Either of them may be true, or both may have 
concurred to the common effect. In favour of the hypothesis of 
seniHty is the fact, recorded by Philhps, that Milton " could not 
hear with patience any such thing when related to him." The 
reader will please to note that this is the original statement, which 
the critics have improved into the statement that he preferred 
Paradise Regained to Paradise Lost. But his approval of his 
work, even if it did not amount to preference, looks Hke the old 
man's fondness for his youngest and weakest offspring. 

Another view of the matter, however, is at least possible. 
Milton's theory as to the true mode of handling a biblical subject 
was, as I have said, to add no more dressing, or adventitious cir- 
cumstance, than should assist the conception of the sacred verity. 
After he had executed Paradise Lost, the suspicion arose that he 
had been too indulgent to his imagination ; that he had created 
too much. He would make a second experiment, m which he 
would enforce his theory with more vigour. In the composition 
of Paradise Lost he must have experienced that the constraint he 
imposed upon himself had generated, as was said of Racine, " a 
plenitude of soul." He might infer that, were the compression 
carried still further, the reaction of the spirit might be still in- 
creased. Poetry, he had said long before, should be "simple, 
sensuous, impassioned" {Tractate of Education). Nothing en- 
hances passion like simplicity. So in Paradise Regained Milton 
has carried simplicity of dress to the verge of nakedness. It is 
probably the most unadorned poem extant in any language. He 
has pushed severe abstinence to the extreme point, possibly be- 
yond the point, where a reader's power is stimulated by the poet's 
parsimony. 

It may elucidate the intention of the author of Paradise Re- 
gained, if we contrast it for a moment with a poem constructed 
upon the opposite principle, that, viz., of the maximum of adorn- 
ment. C\^.\.\dmx\'s Rape of Proserpine (a.d, 400) is one of the most 
rich and elaborate poems ever written. It has in common with 
Milton the circumstance that its whole action is contained in a soli- 
tary event, viz., the carrying off of Proserpine from the vale of 
Henna by Pluto. All the personages, too, are superhuman ; and 
the incident itself supernatural. Claudian's ambition was to over- 
lay his story with the gold and jewellery of expression and inven- 
tion. Nothing is named without being carved, decked, and coloured 
from the inexhaustible resources of the poet's treasury. This is 
not done with ostentatious pomp, like the hyperbolical heroes of 
vulgar novelists, but always with taste, which though lavish is diS' 
criminating. 



MILTON. lei 

Milton, like Wordsworth, urged his theory of parsimony fur- 
ther in practice than he would have done had he not been possessed 
by a spirit of protest against prevailing error. Milton's own ideal 
was the chiselled austerity of Greek tragedy. But he was impelled 
to overdo the system of holding back, by his desire to challenge 
the evil spirit which was abroad. He would separate himself not 
only from the Clevelands, the Denhams, and the Drydens, whom 
he did not account as poets at all, but even from the Spenserians. 
Thus, instead of severe, he became rigid, and his plainness is not 
unfrequently jejune. 

"Pomp and ostentation of reading," he had once written, "is 
admired among the vulgar ; but, in matters of religion, he is learned- 
est who is plainest." As Wordsworth had attempted to regener- 
ate poetry by recurring to nature and to common objects, Milton 
would revert to the pure Word of God. He would present no 
human adumbration of goodness, but Christ Himself. He saw that 
here absolute plainness was best. In the presence of this unique 
Being silence alone became t1ie poet. This " higher argument " 
was '' sufficient of itself " {Pa?'adise Lost, ix. 42). 

There are some painters whose work appeals only to painters, 
and not to the public. So the judgment of poets and critics has 
been more favourable to Paradise Regained than the opinion of 
the average reader. Johnson thinks tliat "if it had been written, 
not by Milton, but by some imitators, it would receive universal 
praise." Wordsworth thought it " the most perfect in execution 
of anything written by Milton." And Coleridge says of it, " in its 
kind it is the most perfect poem extant." 

There is a school of critics which maintains that a poem is, like 
a statue or a picture, a work of pure art, of which beauty is the 
only characteristic of which the reader should be cognisant. And 
beauty is wholly ideal, an absolute quality, out of relation to per- 
son, time, or circumstance. To such readers Samson Agonistes 
will seem tame, flat, meaningless, and artificial. From the point of 
view of the critic of the eighteenth century, it is " a tragedy which 
only ignorance would admire and bigotry applaud " (Dr. Johnson). 
If, on the other hand, it be read as a page of cotemporary history, it 
becomes human, pregnant with real woe, the record of an heroic 
soul, not baffled by temporary adversity, but totally defeated by an 
irreversible fate, and unflinchingly accepting the situation, in the 
firm conviction of the righteousness of the cause. If fiction is truer 
than fact, fact is more tragic than fiction. In the course of the 
long struggle of human liberty against the church, there had been 
many terrible catastrophes. But the St. Bartholomew, the Revoca- 
tion of the Edict, the Spanish Inquisition, Alva in the Low Coun- 
tries — these and other days of suffering and rebuke have been left 
to the dull pen of the annahst, who has variously diluted their story 
in his literary circumlocution office. The triumpliant royalist reac- 
tion of 1660, when the old serpent bruised the heel of freedom by 
totally crushing Puritanism, is singular in this, that the agonised 



122 MILTON. 

cry of the beaten party has been preserved in a cotemporary monu- 
ment, the intensest utterance of the most intense of EngHsh poets 
— the Sai?ison Agonistes. 

In the covert representation, which we have in this drama, of 
the actual wreck of Milton, his party, and his cause, is supplied 
that real basis of truth which was necessary to inspire him to write. 
It is of little moment that the incidents of Samson's hfe, do not 
form a strict parallel to those of Milton's life, or to the career of 
the Puritan cause. The resemblance lies in the sentiment and 
situation, not in the bare event. The glorious youth of the conse- 
crated deliverer, his signal overthrow of the Philistine foe with 
means so inadequate that the hand of God was manifest in the 
victory; his final humiliation, which he owed to his own weakness 
and disobedience, and the present revelry and feasting of the uncir- 
cumcised Philistines in the temple of their idol— all these things 
together constitute a parable of which no reader of Milton's day 
could possibly mistake the interpretation. More obscurely adum- 
brated is the day of vengeance when virtue should return to the 
repentant backslider, and the idolatrous crew should be smitten 
with a swift destruction in the midst of their insolent revelry. 
Add to these the two great personal misfortunes of the poet's life, 
his first marriage v.ith a Philistine woman, out of sympathy with 
him or his cause, and his blindness ; and the basis of reality be- 
comes so complete, that the nominal personages of the drama 
almost disappear behind tlie history which we read through them. 

But while for the biographer of Milton Savison Ago7i2stes is 
charged with a pathos, which as the expression of real suffering no 
fictiue tragedy can equal, it must be felt that as a composition the 
drama is languid, nerveless, occasionally halting, never brilliant. 
If the date of the composition of the Sa7nson be 1663, this may have 
been the result of weariness after the effort of Paradise Lost. If 
this drama were composed in 1667, it would be the author's last 
poetical effort, and the natural explanation would then be that his 
power over language was failing. The power of metaphor, /. <?., of 
indirect expression, is, according to Aristotle, the characteristic of 
genius. It springs from vividness of conception of the thing 
spoken of. It is evident that this intense action of the presenta- 
tive faculty is no longer at the disposal of the writer of Sanisoii. 
In Paradise Regained we are conscious of a purposed restraint of 
strength. The simplicity of its style is an experiment, an essay of 
a new theory of poetic words. The simplicity of Savison Agonistes 
is a flagging of the forces, a drying up of the rich sources from 
wliich had once flowed the golden stream of suggestive phrase which 
make Pa?'adise Lost a unique monument of the English language. 
I could almost fancy that the consciousness of decay utters itself 
in the lines (594) — 

" I feel my genial spirits droop, 

My hopes all flat, nature within me seems 

In all her functions wearv of herself, 

My race of glorv run, and race of shame, 

And I shall shortly be with them that rest." 



MILTON. 123 

The point of view I have insisted on is that Milton conceives a 
poet to be one who employs his imagination to make a revelation 
of truth, truth which the poet himself entirely believes. One ob- 
jection to this point of view will at once occur to the reader, the 
habitual employment in both poems of the fictions of pagan myth- 
ology. This is an objection as old as Miltonic criticism. The 
objection came from those readers who had no difficulty in realis- 
ing the biblical scenes, or in accepting demoniac agency, but who 
found their imagination repelled by the introduction of the gods of 
Greece or Rome. It is not that the biblical heaven and the Greek 
Olympus are incongruous, but it is the unreal blended with the real, 
in a way to destroy credibility. 

To this objection the answer has been supplied by De Qnincey. 
To Milton the personages of the heathen Pantheon were not merely 
familiar fictions, or estabhshed poetical properties ; they were evil 
spirits. This was the received creed of the early interpreters. In 
their demonology, the Hebrew and the Greek poets had a common 
ground. Up to the advent of Christ, the fallen angels had been 
permitted to delude mankind. To Milton, as to Jerome, Moloch 
was Mars, and Chemosh Priapus. Plato knew of hell as Tartarus, 
and the battle of the giants in Hesiod is no fiction, but an obscured 
tradition of the war once waged in heaven. What has been ad- 
verse to Milton's art of illusion is, that the belief that the gods of 
the heathen world were the rebellious angels has ceased to be part 
of the common creed of Christendom. Milton was nearly the last 
of our great writers who was fully possessed of the doctrine. His 
readers now no longer share it with the poet. In Addison's time 
(171 2) some of the imaginary persons in Paradise LostwQVQ begin- 
ning to make greater demands upon the faith of readers than those 
cool rationahsic times could meet. 

There is an element of decay and death in poems which we 
vainly style immortal. Some of the sources of Milton's power are 
already in process of drying up. I do not speak of the ordinary 
caducity of language, in virtue of which every effusion of the human 
spirit is lodged in a body of death. Milton suffers little as yet 
from this cause. There are few lines in his poems which are less 
intelligible now than they were at the time they were written. This 
is partly to be ascribed to his limited vocabulary, Milton, in his 
verse, using not more than eight thousand words, or about half the 
number used by Shakspcare. Nay, the position of our earlier 
writers has been improved by the mere spread of the English 
language over a wider area. Addison apologised for Paradise Lost 
falling short of the.^;^6^/^, because of the inferiority of the language 
in which it was written. " So divine a poem in English is like a 
stately palace built of brick." The defects of Enghsh for purposes 
of rhythm and harmony are as great now as they ever were, but the 
space that our speech fills in the world is vastly increased, and this 
increase of consideration is reflected back upon our older writers. 

But if, as a treasury of poetic speech. Paradise Lost has gained 
by time, it has lost far more as a storehouse of divine truth. We 



124 MILTON. 

at this day are better able than ever to appreciate its force of ex- 
pression, its grace of plirase, its harmony of rhythmical movement, 
but it is losing its hold over our imagination. Strange to say, this 
failure of vital power in the constitution of the poem is due to the 
very selection of subject by which Milton sought to secure perpe- 
tuity. Not content with being the poet of men, and with describ- 
ing human passions and ordinary events, he aspired to present the 
destiny of the whole race of mankind, to tell the story of crea- 
tion, and to reveal the councils of heaven and hell. And he would 
raise this structure upon no unstable base, but upon the sure 
foundation of the written word. It would have been a thing in- 
credible to Milton that the hold of the Jewish Scriptures over the 
imagination of English men and women could ever be weakened. 
This process, however, has already commenced. The demonology 
of the poem has already, with educated readers, passed from the 
region of fact into that of fiction. Not so universally, but with a 
large number of readers, the angelology can be no more than what 
the critics call machinery. And it requires a violent effort from 
any of our day to accommodate our conceptions to the anthropomor- 
phic theology of Paradise Lost. Were the sapping process to con- 
tinue at the same rate for two more centuries, the possibility of 
epic illusion would be lost to the whole scheme and economy of 
the poem. Milton has taken a scheme of life for life itself. Had 
he, in the choice of subject, remembered the principles of the 
Aristotelean Poetic (which he otherwise highly prized), that men in 
action are the poet's proper theme, he would have raised his im- 
aginative fabric on a more permanent foundation ; upon the ap- 
petites, passions, and emotions of men, their vices and virtues, 
their aims and ambitions, which are a far more constant quantity 
than any theological system. This, perhaps, was what Goethe 
meant when he pronounced the subject of Paradise Lost to be 
" abominable, with a fair outside, but rotten inwardly." 

Whatever fortune may be in store for Paradise I^ost in the 
time to come, Milton's choice of subject was, at the time he wrote, 
the only one which offered him the guarantees of reality, authen- 
ticity, and divine truth which he required. We need not, there- 
fore, search the annals of literature to find the poem which may 
have given the first suggestion of the fall of man as a subject. 
This, however, has been done by curious antiquaries, and a list of 
more than two dozen authors has been made, from one or other 
of whom Milton may have taken either the general idea or parti- 
cular hints for single incidents. Milton, without being a very wide 
reader, was likely to have seen \\\& Adannis Exuloi Grotius (1601), 
and he certainly had read Giles Fletcher's CJwisfs Victory and 
Triumph (1610'). There are traces of verbal reminiscence of 
Sylvester's translation of D21 Partus. But out of the long cata- 
logue of his predecessors there appear only three who can claim to 
have conceived the same theme with anything like the same breadth, 
or on the same scale as Milton has done. These are the so-cllaed 
Caedmon, Andreini, and Vondel. 



MILTON. 12 e 

t. The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem which passes under the 
name of C^edmon has this one point of resemblance to the plot of 
Paradise Lost, that in it the seduction of Eve is Satan's revenge 
for his expulsion from heaven. As Francis Junius was much oc- 
cupied upon this poem, of which he published the text in 1655, it 
is likely enough that he should have talked of it with his friend 
Milton. 

2. Voltaire related that Milton during his tour in Italy (1638) 
had seen performed D Adamo, a sacred drama by the Florentine 
Giovanni Battista Andreini, and that he "'took from that ridiculous 
trifle " the hint of the "noblest product of human imagination." 
Though Voltaire relates this as a matter of fact, it is doubtful if it 
be more than an on dit which he had picked up in London society. 
Voltaire could not have seen Andreini's drama, for it is not at all a 
ridiculous trifle. Though much of the dialogue is as insipid as 
dialogue in operattas usually is, there is great invention in the plot, 
and animation in the action. Andreini is incessantly offending 
against taste, and is infected with the vice of the Marinists, the 
pursuit of concetti., or far-fetched analogies between things unlike. 
His infernal personages are grotesque and disgusting, rather than 
terrible ; his scenes in heaven childish — at once familiar and fan- 
tastic, in the style of the Mysteries of the age before the drama. 
With all these faults the Ada?no is a lively and spirited represen- 
tation of the Hebrew legend, and not unworthy to have been the 
antecedent of Paradise Lost. There, is no question of plagiarism, 
for the resemblance is not even that of imitation or parentage, or 
adoption. The utmost that can be conceded is to concur in Hay- 
ley's opinion that, either in representation or in perusal, the Adamo 
of Andreini had made an impression on the mind of Milton ; had, 
as Voltaire says, revealed to him the hidden majesty of the subject. 
There had been at least three editions of the Adamo by 1641, and 
Milton may have brought one of these with him among the books 
which he had shipped from Venice, even if he had not seen the 
drama on the Italian stage, or had not, as Todd suggests, met 
Andreini in person. 

So much appears to me to be certain from the internal evidence 
of the two compositions as they stand. But there are further 
some slight corroborative circumstances, (i.) The Trinity College 
sketch, so often referred to, of Milton's scheme, when it was 
intended to be dramatic, keeps much more closely, both in its per- 
sonages and in its ordering, to Andreini. (ii.) In Phillips's Thatrwn 
Poeta7'Ji7n, a compilation in which he had his uncle's help, An- 
dreini is mentioned as author " of a fantastic poem entitled Olivas- 
tro, which was printed at Bologna, 1642." If Andreini was known 
to Edward Phillips, the inference is that he was known to Milton. 

3. Lastly, though external evidence is here wanting, it cannot 
be doubted that Milton was acquainted with the Lucifer of the 
Dutch poet, Joost van den Vondel, which appeared in 1654. This 
poem is a regular five-act drama in the Dutch language, a language 
which Milton was able to read. In spite of commercial rivalry 



,26 MILTON^ 

and naval war there was much intercourse between the two repub- 
lics, and Amsterdam books camo in regular course to London. 
The Dutch drama turns entirely on the revolt of the angels, and 
their expulsion from heaven, the tall of man being but a subordi- 
nate incident. In Paradise Lost, the relation of the two events is 
inverted, the fall of the angels being there an episode, not trans- 
acted, but told by one of the personages of the epic. It is, there- 
fore, only in one book of Paradise Lost, the sixth, that the influ- 
ence of Vondel can be looked for. There may possibly occur in 
other parts of our epic single lines of which an original may be 
found in Vondel's drama. Notably such a one is the often- 
ciuoted — 

" Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." 

Paradise Lost, i. 263 
which is Vondel's — 

** En liever d'eerste Vorst in eenigh lager hot 
Dan in't gezalight licht de tvveede, of noch een minder! " 

But it is in the sixth book only in which anything more than a 
verbal similarity is traceable. According to Mr. Gosse, who has 
given an analysis, with some translated extracts, of Vondel's Luci- 
fer, the resemblances are too close and too numerous to be mere 
coincidences. Vondel is more human than Milton, just where 
human attributes are unnatural, so that heaven is made to seem 
like earth, while in Paradise Lost we always feel that we are in a 
region aloft. Miltonic presentation has a dignity and elevation, 
which is not only wanting but is sadly missed in the Dutch drama, 
even the language of which seems common and famihar. 

The poems now mentioned form, taken together, the antece- 
dents of Paradise Lost. In no one instance, taken singly, is the 
relation of Milton to a predecessor that of imitation, not even to 
the extent in which the yEneid, for instance, is an imitation of the 
Iliad and Odyssey. The originality of Milton lies not in his sub- 
ject, but in his manner ; not in his thoughts, but in his mode of 
thinking. His story and his personages, their acts and words, had 
been the common property of all poets since the fall of the Roman 
Empire. Not only the three I have specially named had boldly 
attempted to set forth a mythical representation of the origin of 
evil, but many others had fluttered round the same central object 
of poetic attraction. Many of these productions Milton had read, 
and they had made their due impression on his mind according to 
their degree of force. When he began to compose Paradise Lost he 
had the reading of a lifetime behind him. His imagination worked 
upon an accumulated store, to which books, observation, and re- 
flection had contributed in equal proportions. He drew upon this 
store without conscious distinction of its sources. Not that this 
was a recollected material, to which the poet had recourse when- 
ever invention failed him ; it was identified with himself. His 
verse flowed from his own soul, but it was a soul which had grown 



MILTON. 127 

up nourished with the spoil of all the ages. He created his epic, 
as metaphysicians have said that God created the world, by draw- 
ing it out of himself, not by building it up out of elements supplied 
ab extra. 

The resemblances to earher poets — Greek, Latin, Italian — which 
could be pointed out in Paj-adise Lost., were so numerous that in 
1695, only twenty-one years after Milton's death, an editor, one 
Patrick Hume, a school-master in the neighbourhood of London, 
was employed by Tonson to point out the imitations in an an- 
notated edition. From that time downwards, the diligence of our 
literary antiquaries has been busily employed in the same track of 
research, and it has been extended to the English poets, a field 
which was overlooked, or not known to the first collector. The 
result is a valuable accumulation of parallel passages, which have 
been swept up into our van'orttm Miltons, and make Paradise Lost, 
for English phraselogy, what Virgil was for Latin in the middle 
ages, the centre round which the study moves. The learner who 
desires to cultivate his feeling for the fine shades and variations of 
expression has here a rich opportunity, and will acknowledge with 
gratitude the laborious services of Newton, Pearce, the Wartons, 
Todd, Mitford, and other compilers. But these heaped-up citations 
of parallel passages somewhat tend to hide from us the secret of 
Miltonic language. We are apt to think that the magical effect of 
Milton's words has been produced by painfully inlaying tessera of 
borrowed metaphor — a mosaic of bits culled from extensive read- 
ing, carried along by a retentive memory, and pieced together so 
as to produce a new whole, with the exquisite art of a Japanese 
cabinet-maker. It is sometimes admitted that Milton was a plagi- 
ary, but it is urged in extenuation that his plagiarisms were always 
repoduced in finer forms. 

It is not in the spirit of vindicating Milton, but as touching the 
mystery of metrical language, that I stay a few moments upon this 
misconception. It is true that Milton has a way of making his 
own even what he borrows. While Horace's thefts from Alcaeus or 
Pindar are palpable, even from the care which he takes to Latinise 
them, Milton cannot help transfusing his own nature into the words 
he adopts. But this is far from all. When Milton's widow was 
asked " if he did not often read Homer and Virgil, she understood 
it as an imputation upon him for stealing from those authors, and 
answered, with eagerness, that he stole from nobody but the muse 
who inspired him." This is more true than she knew. It is true 
there are many phrases or images in Paradise Lost taken from 
earlier writers — taken, not stolen, for the borrowing is done openly. 
When Adam, for instance, begs Raphael to prolong his discourse 
deep into night, 

" Sleep, listening to thee, will watch ; 
Or we can bid his absence, till thy song 
End, and dismiss thee ere the morning shine;" 

we cannot be mistaken in saying that we have here a conscious 



128 MILTON. 

reminiscence of the words of Alcinous to Ulysses in the eleventh 
book of the Odyssey. Such imitation is on the surface, and does 
not touch the core of that mysterious combination of traditive with 
original elements in diction, which Milton and Virgil, alone of poets 
known to us, have effected. Here and there, many times, m 
detached places, Milton has consciously imitated. But, beyond 
this obvious indebtedness, there runs through the whole texture of 
his verse a suggestion of secondary meaning, a meaning which has 
been accreted to the words, by their passage down the consecrated 
stream of classical poetry. Milton quotes very little for a man of 
much reading. He says of himself {J7idg7nent of Bucer) that he 
"never could delight in long citations, much less in whole traduc- 
tions, whether it be natural disposition or education in me, or that 
my mother bore me a speaker of what God made mine own, and 
not a translator." And the observation is as old as Bishop New- 
ton, that " there is scarce any author who has written so much, and 
upon such various subjects, and yet quotes so little from his 
cotemporary authors." It is said that " he could repeat Homer 
almost all without book." But we know that common minds are 
apt to explain to themselves the working of mental superiority by 
exaggerating the power of memory. Milton's own writings remain 
a sufficient evidence that his was not a verbal memory. And, psy- 
chologically, the power of imagination and the power of verbal 
memory are almost always found in inverse proportion. 

Milton's diction is the elaborated outcome of all the best words 
of all antecedent poetry, not by a process of recollected reading 
and storage, but by the same mental habit by which we learn to 
speak our mother-tongue. Only, in the ,case of the poet, the vocab- 
ulary acquired has a new meaning superadded to the words, from 
the occasion on which they have been previously employed by 
others. Words, over and above their dictionary signification, con- 
note all the feeling which has gathered round them by reason of 
their employment through a hundred generations of song. In the 
words of Mr. Myers, " without ceasing to be a logical step in the 
argument, a phrase becomes a centre of emotional force. The 
complex associations which it evokes, modify the associations 
evoked by other words in the same passage, in a way distinct from 
logical or grammatical connection." The poet suggests much 
more than he says, or, as Milton himself has phrased it, "more is 
meant than meets the ear." 

For the purposes of poetry a thought is the representative of 
many feelings, and a word is the representative of many thoughts. 
A single word may thus set in motion in us the vibration of a feel- 
ing first consigned to letters 3000 years ago. For oratory words 
should be winged, that they may do their work of persuasion. For 
poetry words should be freighted with associations of feeling, that 
they may awaken sympathy. It is the suggestive power of words 
that the poet cares for, rather than their current denotation. How 
laugliable are the attempts of the commentators to interpret a line 
in Virgil as they would a sentence in Aristotle's Physics ! Milton's 



MILTON. 



29 



secret lies in his mastery over the rich treasure of this inherited 
vocabulary. He wielded it as his own, as a second motlier-tongue, 
the native and habitual idiom of his thought and feeling, backed 
by a massive frame of character, and " a power which is got within 
me to a passion." {Areopagitica.) 

When Wordsworth came forward at the end of the eighteenth 
century with his famous reform of the language of English poetry, 
the Miltonic diction was the current coin paid out by every versi- 
fier. Wordsworth revolted against this dialect as unmeaning, 
hollow, gaudy, and inane. His reform consisted in dropping the 
consecrated phraseology altogether, and reverting to the common 
language of ordinary life. It was necessary to do this in order to 
reconnect poetry with the sympathies of men, and make it again a 
true utterance, instead of the ingenious exercise in putting together 
words which it had become. In projecting this abandonment of 
the received tradition, it may be thought that Wordsworth was con- 
demning the Miltonic system of expression in itself. But this was 
not so. Milton's language had become, in the hands of the imi- 
tators of the eighteenth century, sound v/ithout sense, a husk with- 
out the kernel, a body of words without the soul of poetry. Milton 
had created and wielded an instrument which was beyond the 
control of any less than himself. He wrote it as a living language ; 
the poetasters of the eighteenth century wrote it as dead language, 
as boys make Latin verses. Their poetry is to Paradise Lost, as 
a modern Gothic restoration is to a genuine middle-age church. 
It was against the feeble race of imitators, and not against the 
master himself, that the protest of the lake poet was raised. He 
proposed to do away with the Miltonic vocabulary altogether, not 
because it was in itself vicious, but because it could now only be 
employed at second-hand. 

One drawback there was attendant upon the style chosen by 
Milton, viz., that it narrowly limited the circle of his readers. All 
words are addressed to those who understand them. The Welsh 
triads are not for those who have not learnt Welsh ; an English 
poem is only for those who understand English. But of under- 
standing English there are many degrees ; it requires some educa- 
tion to understand literary style at all. A large majority of the 
natives of any country possess, and use, only a small fraction of 
their mother-tongue. These people may be left out of the dis- 
cussion. Confining ourselves only to that small part of our millions 
which we speak of as the educated classes — that is, those whose 
schooling is carried on beyond fourteen years of age — it will be 
found that only a small fraction of the men, and a still smaller frac- 
tion of the women, fully apprehend the meaning of words. This 
is the case with what is written in the ordinary language of books. 
When we pass from a style in which words have only their simple 
signification, to a style of which the effect depends on the sugges- 
tion of collateral association, we leave behind the majority even of 
these few. This is what is meant by the standing charge against 
Milton that he is too learned. 



X30 MILTON. 

It is no paradox to say that Milton was not a learned man. 
Such men there were in his day — Usher, Selden, Voss, in Eng- 
land ; in Holland, Milton's adversary Salmanasius, and many 
more. A learned man was one who could range freely and surely 
over the whole of classical and patristic remains in the Greek and 
Latin languages (at least), with the accumulated stores of philo- 
logical, chronological, historical criticism necessary for the inter- 
pretation of those remains. Milton had neither made these acqui- 
sitions nor aimed at them. He even expresses himself, in his 
vehement way, with contempt of them. " Hollow antiquities sold 
by the seeming bulk," "marginal stuffings," "horse-loads of 
citations and fathers," are some of his petulant outbursts against 
the learning that had been played upon his position by his ad- 
versaries. He says expressly that he had "not read the Councils, 
save here and there " [Smectynimius). His own practice had 
been "industrious and select reading." He chose to make himself 
a scholar rather than a learned man. The aim of his studies was 
to improve faculty, not to acquire knowledge. " Who would be a 
poet must himself be a true poem ; " his heart should " contain of 
just, wise, good, the perfect shape." He devoted himself to self- 
preparation with the assiduity of Petrarch or of Goethe. " In 
wearisome labour and studious watchings I have tired out almost 
a whole youth." "Labour and intense study I take to be my 
portion in this Hfe." He would know, not all, but " what was of 
use to know," and form himself by assiduous culture. The first 
Englishman of whom the designation of our series, Me7i of Letters^ 
is appropriate, Milton was also the noblest example of the type. 
He cultivated, not letters, but himself, and sought to enter mto 
possession of his own mental kingdom, not that he might reign 
there, but that he might royally use its resources in building up a 
work which should bring honour to his country and his native 
tongue. 

The style of Paradise Lost is then only the natural expression 
of a soul thus exquisitely nourished upon the best thoughts and 
finest words of all ages. It is the language of one who lives in the 
companionship of the great and the wise of past time. It is in- 
evitable that when such a one speaks, his tones, his accent, the 
melodies of his rhythm, the inner harmonies of his linked thoughts, 
the grace of his allusive touch, should escape the common ear. To 
follow Milton one should at least have tasted the same training 
through which he put himself. " Te quoque dignum finge deo." 
The many cannot see it, and complain that the poet is too learned. 
They would have Milton talk like Bunyan or William Cobbett, 
whom they understand. Milton did attempt the demagogue in his 
pamphlets, only with the result of blemishing his fame and de- 
grading his genius. The best poetry is that which calls upon us to 
rise to it, not that which writes down to us. 

Milton knew that his was not the road to popularity. He 
thirsted for renown, but he did not confound renown with vogue. 
A poet has his choice between the many and the few ; Milton 



MILTON. J-, 

chose the few. " Paucis hujusmodi lectoribus contentus," is his 
own inscription in a copy of his pamphlets sent by him to Patrick 
Young. He derived a stern satisfaction from the reprobation with 
which the vulgar visited him. His divorce tracts were addressed 
to men who dared to think, and ran the town " numbering good in- 
tellects." His poems he wished laid up in the Bodleian Library, 
"where the jabber of common people cannot penetrate, and 
whence the base throng of readers keep aloof " {Ode to Rouse). If 
Milton resembled a Roman republican in the severe and stoic 
elevation of his character, he also shared the aristocratic intellect- 
ualism of the classical type. He is in marked contrast to the lev- 
elling hatred of excellence, the Christian trades-unionism of the 
model Catholic of the mould of S. Francois de Sales, whose maxim 
of life is *-niarchons avec la troupe de nos freres et compagnons, 
doucement, paisiblement, et amiablement." To Milton the people 
are — ■ 

" But a herd confus'd, 
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol 
Things vulgar." — Paradise Regained, iii. 49. 

At times his indignation carries him past the courtesies of 
equal speech, to pour out the vials of prophetic rebuke, when he 
contemplates the hopeless struggle of those who are the salt of 
the earth, " amidst the throng and noises of vulgar and irrational 
men" {Teiuire of Kings'), and he rates to their face as "owls and 
cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs" {Sonnet XII.) : not because they 
will not listen to him, but because they "hate learning more than 
toad or asp " {Sonnet IX.). 

Milton's attitude must be distinguished from patrician pride, or 
the 7wli'me-tangere of social exclusiveness. Nor, again, was it, 
like Callimachus's, the fastidious repulsion of a delicate taste for 
the hackneyed in literary expression ; it was the lofty disdain of 
aspiring virtue for the sordid and ignoble. 

Various ingredients, constitutional or circumstantial, concurred 
to produce this repellent or unsympathetic attitude in Milton. 
His dogmatic Calvinism, from the effects of which his mind never 
recovered — a system which easily disposes to a cynical abasement 
of our fellow-men — counted for something. Something must be 
set down to habitual converse with the classics — a converse which 
tends to impart to character, as Platner said of Godfrey Hermann, 
"a certain grandeur and generosity, removed from the spirit of cabal 
and mean cunning which prevail among men of the world." His 
blindness threw him out of the competition of hfe, and back upon 
himself, in a way which was sure to foster egotism. These were 
constitutional elements of that aloofness from men which charac- 
terised all liis utterance. These disposing causes became inex- 
orable fate, when, by the turn of the poHtical wheel of fortune, he 
found himself alone amid the mindless dissipation and reckless 
materialism of the Restoration. He must have felt himself then, 
"Miltonus contra mundum," at war with human society as con- 



132 MILTON. 

stituted around him, and driven to withdraw himself within a 
poetic world of his own creation. 

In this antagonism of the poet to his age much was lost ; much 
energy was consumed in what was mere friction. The artist is 
then most powerful when he finds himself in accord with the age 
he lives in. The plenitude of art is only reached when it marches 
with the sentiments which possess a community. The defiant at- 
titude easily slides into paradox, and the mind falls in love with its 
own wilfulness. The exceptional emergence of Milton's three 
poems, Paradise Lost, Regamed, and Sajnsoft, deeply colours their 
context. The greatest achievement of art in their kinds have been 
the capital specimens of a large crop ; as the Iliad and Odyssey 
are the picked lines out of many rhapsodies, and Shakspeare the 
king of an army of cotemporary dramatists. Milton was a sur- 
vival, felt himself such, and resented it. 

" Unchang'd, 
.... Though fall'n on evil days, 
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues; 
In darkness, and with dangers compass'd round, 
And solitude," — Paradise Lost, vii. 24. 

Poetry thus generated, we should naturally expect to meet with 
more admiration than sympathy. And such, on the whole, has 
been Milton's reception. In 1678, twenty years after the pubhca- 
tion of Paradise Lost, Prior spoke of him {Hind Transvcrsed) as 
*'a rough, unhewn fellow, that a man must sweat to read him." 
And in 1842, Hallam had doubts "if Paradise Z^?^/, published 
eleven years since, would have met with a greater demand " than it 
did at first. It has been much disputed by historians of our 
literature what inference is to be drawn from the numbers sold of 
Paradise Lost at its first pubHcation. Betv/een 1667 and 168S, a 
space of twenty years, three editions had been printed, making 
together some 4500 copies. Was this a large or a small circulation .? 
Opinions are at variance on the point. Johnson and Hallam 
thought it a large sale, as books went at that time. Campbell, and 
the majority of our annalists of books, have considered it as evidence 
of neglect. Comparison with what is known of other cases of cir- 
culation leads to no more certain conclusion. On the one hand, 
the public could not take more than three editions— say 3000 copies 
— of the plays of Shakspeare in sixty years, from 1623 to 1684. If 
this were a fair measure of possible circulation at the time, we 
should have to pronounce Milton's sale a great success. On the 
other hand, Cleveland's poems ran through sixteen or seventeen 
editions in about thirty years. If this were the average output of 
a popular book, the inference would be that Paradise Lost was not 
such a book. 

Whatever conclusion may be the true one from the amount of 
the public demand, we cannot be wrong in asserting that from the 
first, and now as then. Paradise Lost has been more admired than 
read. The poet's wish and expectation that he should find "fit 



MILTON. 133 

audience, though few," has been fulfilled. Partly this has been 
due to his limitation, his unsympathetic disposition, the deficiency 
of the human element in his imagination, and his presentation of 
mythical instead of real beings. But it is also in part a tribute to 
his excellence, and is to be ascribed to the lofty strain, which 
requires more effort to accompany than an average reader is able 
to make, a majestic demeanour which no parodist has been able to 
degrade, and a wealth of allusion demanding more literature than 
is possessed by any but the few whose hfe is lived with the poets. 
An appreciation of Milton is the last reward of consummated schol- 
arship; and we may apply to him what Quintilian has said of 
Cicero, " Ille se profecisse sciat, cui Cicero valde placebit." 

Causes other than the inherent faults of the poem long con- 
tinued to weigh down the reputation of Paradise Lost. In Great 
Britain the sense for art, poetry, literature, is confined to a few, 
while our political life has been diffused and vigorous. Hence all 
judgment, even upon a poet, is biassed by considerations of party. 
Before 1688 it was impossible that the poet, who had justified 
regicide, could have any public beyond the suppressed and crouch- 
ing Nonconformists. The Revolution of 1688 removed this ban, 
and from that date forward the liberal party in England adopted 
Milton as the Republican poet. William Hogg, writing in 1690, 
says of Paradise Lost that " the fame of the poem is spread 
through the whole of England, but being written in English, it is 
as yet unknown in foreign lands." This is obvious exaggeration. 
Lauder, about 1 748, gives the date exactly, when he speaks of 
" that infinite tribute of veneration that has been paid to him these 
sixty years past.'''' One distinguished exception there was. Dryden, 
royalist and Catholic though he was, was loyal to his art. Nothing 
which Dryden ever wrote is so creditable to his taste as to his 
being able to see, and daring to confess, in the day of disesteem, 
that the regicide poet alone deserved the honour which his co- 
temporaries were for rendering to himself. Dryden's saying, 
" This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too," is not perfectly 
well vouched, but it would hardly have been invented, if it had not 
been known to express his sentiments. And Dryden's sense of 
Milton's greatness grew with his taste. When, in the preface to 
his State of Innocence (1674), Dryden praised Paradise Lost,'^^ 
*'knew not half the extent of its excellence," John Dennis says, " as 
more than twenty years afterwards he confessed to me." Had he 
known it, he never could have produced his vulgar parody. The 
State of Innocence, a piece upon which he received the com- 
pliments of his cotemporaries, as " having refined the ore of 
Milton." 

With the one exception of Dryden, a better critic than poet, 
Milton's repute was the work of the Whigs. The first Sdition de 
hixe of Paradise Lost (1688) was brought out by a subscription 
got up by the Whig leader, Lord Somers. In this edition Dryden's 
pinchbeck epigram, so often quoted, first appeared, — 
" Three poets in three distant ages born," &c. 



134 



MIL TOY. 



It was the Whig essayist, Addison, whose papers in the Spectator 
(1712) did most to make the poem popularly known. In 1737, in 
the height of the Whig ascendancy, the bu^tof Milton penetrated 
Westminster Abbey, though, in the generation before, the Dean of 
that day had refused to admit an inscription on the monument 
erected to John Phillips, because the name of Milton occurred 
in it. 

The zeal of the Liberal party in the propagation of the cult of 
Milton was of course encountered by an equal passion on the part 
of the Tory opposition. They were exasperated by the lustre 
which was reflected upon Revolution principles by the name of 
Milton. About the middle of the eighteenth century, when Whig 
popularity was already beginning to wane, a desperate attempt 
was made by a rising Tory pamphleteer to crush the new Liberal 
idol. Dr. Johnson, the most vigorous writer of the day, conspired 
with one William Lauder, a nafive of Scotland seeking fortune in 
London, to starnp out Milton's credit by proving him to be a 
wholesale plagiarist. Milton's imitations — he had gathered pearls 
wherever they were to be found — were thus to be turned into an 
indictment against him. One of the beauties of Pcwadise Lost is, 
as has been already said, the scholar's flavour of hterary reminis- 
cence which hangs about its words and images. This VirgiHan 
art, in which Milton has surpassed his master, was represented by 
this pair of literary bandits as theft, and held to prove at once 
moral obliquity and intellectual feebleness. This line of criticism 
was well chosen ; it was, in fact, an appeal to the many from the 
few. Unluckily for the plot, Lauder was not satisfied with the 
amount of resemblance shown by real parallel passages. He 
ventured upon the bold step of forging verses, closely resembling 
lines in Paradise Lost, and ascribing these verses to older poets. 
He even made forged verses as quotations from Paradise Lost, and 
showed them as "Milton's plagiarisms from preceding writers. 
Even these clumsy fictions might have passed without detection 
at that uncritical period of our literature, and under the shelter of 
the name of Samuel Johnson. But Lauder's impudence grew with 
the success of his criticisms, which he brought out as letters, 
through a series of years, in the Getitleuiaji's Magazine. There 
was a translation of Paradise Lost into Latin hexameters, which 
had been made in 1690 by one William Hogg. Lauder inserted 
lines, taken from this translation, into passages taken from 
Messenius, Staphorstius, Taubmannus, neo-Latin poets, whom 
Milton had, or might have read, and presented these passages as 
thefts by Milton. 

Low as learning had sunk in England in 1750, Hogg's Latin 
Paradisus amissus was just the book which tutors of colleges who 
could teach Latin verses had often in their hands. Mr. Bowie, a 
tutor of Oriel College, Oxford, immediately recognised an old ac- 
quaintance in one or two of the interpolated lines. This put him 
upon the scent, he submitted Lauder's passages to a closer inves- 
tigation, and the whole fraud was exposed. Johnson, who was not 



MILTON. 



^Zh 



concerned in the cheat, and was only guilty of indolence and party 
spirit, saved himself by sacrificing his comrade. He afterwards 
took ample revenge for the mortification of this exposure in his 
Lives of the Poets, in which he employed all his vigorous powers 
and consummate skill to write down Milton. He undoubtedly 
dealt a heavy blow at the poet's reputation, and succeeded in 
damaging it for at least two generations of readers. He did for 
Milton w^hat Aristophanes did for Socrates, effaced the real man, 
and replaced him by a distorted and degrading caricature. 

It was again a clergyman to whom Milton owed his vindication 
from Lauder's onslaught. John Douglas, afterwards bishop of 
Salisbury, brought Bowie's materials before the public. But the 
high Anglican section of Enghsh life has never thoroughly ac- 
cepted Milton. R. S. Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow, himself a 
poet of real feeling, gave expression, in rabid abuse of Milton, to 
the antipathy which more judicious churchmen suppress. Even 
the calm and gentle author of the Christian Year, wide heart ill- 
sorted with a narrow creed, deliberately framed a theory of Poetic 
for the express purpose, as it would seem, of excluding the author 
of Paradise Lost from the first class of poets. 

But a work such as Milton has constructed, at once intense 
and elaborate, firmly knitted and broadly laid, can afford to wait. 
Time is all in its favour, and against its detractors. The Church 
never forgives, and faction does not die out. But Milton has 
been, for two centuries, getting beyond the reach of party, whether 
as friends or as foes. In each national aggregate an instinct is al- 
ways at work, an instinct not equal to exact discrimination of lesser 
degrees of merit, but surely finding out the chief forces which have 
found expression in the native tongue. This instinct is not an 
active faculty, and so exposed to the influences which warp the 
will ; it is a passive deposition from unconscious impression. Our 
appreciation of our poet is not to be measured by our choosing 
him for our favourite closet companion, or reading him often. As 
Voltaire wittily said of Dante, " Sa reputation s'afRrmera toujours, 
parce qu'on ne le lit gu^re." We shall prefer to read the fashionable 
novelist of each season as it passes, but we shall choose to be 
represented at the international congress of world poets by Shak* 
speare and Milton ; Shakspeare first, and next Milton. 



THE END. 



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19. Dombeyand Son, Part 1. 20 
Dombey and Son, Part II. 20 

20. Book of Snobs 10 

21. Fairy Tales, Illustrated. .20 

22. TheDisowned 20 

23. Little Dorrit, Part 1 20 

Little Dorrit, Part II 20 

24. Abbotsford and New- 

stead Abbey 10 

25. Oliver Goldsmith, Black 10 

26. The Fire Brigade 2p 

27. Rifle and Hound in Cey- 
lon io 

28. Our Mutual Friend.P't I.20 
OurMutualFriend,P't II. 20 

29. Paris Sketches 15 

30. Belinda 20 

31. Nicholas Nickleby,P't I.20 
NicholasNickleby.P't II. 20 

32. Monarch of Mincing 

Lane 20 

33- Eight Years' Wanderings 

in Ceylon 20 

34' Pictures from Italy 15 

JS.Adventures of Philip, Pt 1. 15 
Adventures of Pliilip, Pt II. 15 

36. Knickerbocker History 

of New York, , , . , ....20 



The Boy at Mugby 10 

Tlie Virginians, Part I.. 20 
The Virginians, Part 1 1. 20 

Erling the Bold 20 

Kenelm Chillingly 20 

Deep Down 20 

Samuel Brohl & Co 20 

Gautran 20 

Bleak House, Part I 20 

Bleak House, Part 1 1... 20 
What Will He Do With 
It ? 2 Parts, each 20 

Sketches of YoungCouples. 10 

Devereux »2o 

j:.ife of Webster, Part 1. 15 
Life of Webster, Pt. II. 15 

The Crayon Papers 20 

The Caxtons, Part I 15 

The Caxtons, Part II ... 15 
Autobiography of An- 
thony Trollope 20 

Critical Reviews, etc 10 

Lucretia 20 

Peter the Whaler 20 

, Last of the Barons. Pt 1. 15 
Last of the Barons, Pt. 1 1 . 1 5 

, Eastern Sketches 15 

All in a Garden Fair 20 

File No. 113 20 

. The Parisians, Part I.. .20 
The Parisians, Part 1 1.. 20 

. Mrs. Darling's Letters. . .20 
Master Humphrey's 

Clock 10 

Fatal Boots, etc 10 

. The Alhambra 15 

The Four Georges 10 

Plutarch's Lives, 5 Pts. $1. 

. Under the Red Flag 10 

TheHaunted House, etc. 10 

■ When the Ship Comes 

Home 10 

One False, both Fair. ...20 
The Mudfog Papers, etc. 10 
My Novel, 3 Parts, each.20 
Conquest of Granada, ..20 

Sketches by Boz 20 

A Christmas Carol, etc. . 15 
lone Stewart 20 

, Harold, 2 PartSj each. . . 15 

Dora Thorne 20 

Maid of Athens 20 

Conquest of Spain 10 

Fitzboodle Papers, etc .. 1 o 

Bracebridge Hall 20 

Uncommercial Traveller.20 

Roundabout Papers 20 

Rossmoyne 20 

A Legend of the Rhine, 

etc 10 

Cox's Diary, etc 10 

Beyond Pardon 20 

Somebody's Luggage,etc. 10 

Godolphin 20 

Salmagundi 20 

Famous Funny Fellows. 20 

Irish Sketches, etc 20 

The Battle of Life, etc... 10 
Pilgrims of the Rhine. . . 15 

Random Shots 20 

Men's Wives 10 

Mysteiy of Edwin Drood.20 



298. 

299 
300 
301. 
302. 
303. 
304. 
305. 
306. 
307. 
308. 

309- 

310. 
311. 
312. 
313. 
314- 
315- 
316. 

317- 
318. 
319- 
320. 
321. 

322. 
323- 
324- 
325- 
326. 
327- 
328. 
329- 
330. 
331. 
332. 
333- 
334. 
335- 
336. 
337- 
338. 
339- 
340. 
341- 
342. 
343- 
344. 
345- 

346. 
347- 
348. 
349- 
350. 
35^' 

352. 
353- 

354. 
355- 

356. 
357. 
358. 
359- 

360, 



Reprinted Pieces 20 

Astoria 20 

Novels by Eminent Handsio 
Companions of Columbus2o 

No Thoroughfare 10 

Character Sketches, etc. 10 

Christmas Books 20 

A Tour on the Prairies... 10 

Ballads 15 

Yellowplush Papers 10 

Life of Mahomet, Part 1. 15 
Life of Mahomet, Pt. II. 15 
Sketches and Travels in 

London lo 

Oliver Goldsmith,Irving.2o 

Captain Bonneville 20 

Golden Girls 20 

English Humorists 15 

Moorish Chronicles 10 

Winifred Power 20 

Great Hoj^gartyDiamond 10 

Pausanias 15 

The New Abelard 20 

A Real Queen 20 

The Rose and the Ring.20 
Wolfert's Roost and Mis- 
cellanies, by Irving 10 

Mark SeawoVth 20 

Life of Paul Jones 20 

Round the World 20 

Elbow Room 20 

The Wizard's Son 25 

Harry Lorrequer 20 

How It All Came Round. 20 
Dante Rosetti's Poems. 20 

The Canon's Ward 20 

Lucile, by O. Meredith- 20 
Every Day Cook Book . . 20 
Lays of Ancient Rome . . 20 

Life of Burns 20 

The Young Foresters. . . 20 
John Bull andHis Island 20 
Salt Water, by Kingston. 20 

The Midshipman 20 

Proctor's Poems 20 

Clayton's Rangers 20 

Schiller's Poems -20 

Goethe's Faust 20 

Goethe's Poems 20 

Life of Thackeray 10 

Dante's Vision of Hell, t 
Purgatory and Paradise.. 20 

An Interesting Case 20 

Life of Byron, Nichol. . . 10 

Life of Bunyan 10 

Valerie's Fate lo 

Grandfather Lickshingle.20 
Lays of the Scottish Ca- 
valiers 20 

Willis' Poems 20 

Tales of the French ?.e- 

volution 15 

Loom and Lugger 20 

More Leaves from a Life 

in the Highlands 15 

Hygiene of the Brain. ..25 

Berkeley the Banker 20 

Homes Abroad 15 

Scott's Lady of the Lake. 

with notes 2c 

Modern Christianity a 
civilized Heathenism.. ..if 



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